Plant-inspired behavior-based controller to enable reaching in redundant continuum robot arms

Abstract: Enabling reaching capabilities in highly redundant continuum robot arms is an active area of research. Existing solutions comprise of task-space controllers, whose proper functioning is still limited to laboratory environments. In contrast, this work proposes a novel plant-inspired behaviour-based controller that exploits information obtained from proximity sensing embedded near the end-effector to move towards a desired spatial target. The controller is tested on a 9-DoF modular cable-driven continuum arm for reaching multiple setpoints in space. The results are promising for the deployability of these systems into unstructured environments.