A force based motion control strategy for hyper-redundant manipulator

In this paper, a motion control strategy based on a disturbance observer for a hyper-redundant manipulator is proposed. In the hyper-redundant manipulator, it is difficult to realize a force or an arbitrary motion control at the end-effector because it requires complicated calculations to construct an acceleration controller in the workspace. To improve this issue, we introduce a simplified motion control strategy based on both the backbone curve (BC) which is generally used in hyper-redundant manipulator control and a workspace observer. The proposed method makes it possible to design the motion controller flexibly and to simplify its calculation process. Furthermore, we are also considering a decentralized control method to extend our proposed controller to a more highly redundant manipulator. The validity of the proposed strategy is confirmed by several experimental results in this paper