A learning-based tip contact force estimation method for tendon-driven continuum manipulator

Abstract Although tendon-driven continuum manipulators have been extensively researched, how to realize tip contact force sensing in a more general and efficient way without increasing the diameter is still a challenge. Rather than use a complex modeling approach, this paper proposes a general tip c...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Fan Feng, Wuzhou Hong, Le Xie
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: Nature Portfolio 2021
Materias:
R
Q
Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/17782891cddf4e07a9708e2867e8ece2
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
Descripción
Sumario:Abstract Although tendon-driven continuum manipulators have been extensively researched, how to realize tip contact force sensing in a more general and efficient way without increasing the diameter is still a challenge. Rather than use a complex modeling approach, this paper proposes a general tip contact force-sensing method based on a recurrent neural network that takes the tendons’ position and tension as the input of a recurrent neural network and the tip contact force of the continuum manipulator as the output and fits this static model by means of machine learning so that it may be used as a real-time contact force estimator. We also designed and built a corresponding three-degree-of-freedom contact force data acquisition platform based on the structure of a continuum manipulator designed in our previous studies. After obtaining training data, we built and compared the performances of a multi-layer perceptron-based contact force estimator as a baseline and three typical recurrent neural network-based contact force estimators through TensorFlow framework to verify the feasibility of this method. We also proposed a manually decoupled sub-estimators algorithm and evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of those two methods.