Advances in Flexible Robotic Manipulator Systems—Part I: Overview and Dynamics Modeling Methods

Flexible robotic manipulators (FRMs) exhibit advantages over traditional rigid-body manipulators, including lower energy consumption, faster response, enhanced safety, reduced spatial footprint, and greater operational flexibility. This article reviews the advancements in the modeling, planning, and control technologies of FRMs, along with their applications and perspectives. Compared with previous survey papers about FRMs, this work has the following highlights. First, modeling methods w.r.t. joint flexibility, link flexibility, and link-joint coupling effects are systematically reviewed; second, FRM motion planning methods are reviewed solely instead of being treated as part of FRM control methods; third, this survey presents the recent advancements in FRMs that incorporate artificial intelligence (AI), acknowledging AI as a prevalent research trend; and finally, this is the only survey to systematically explore the rapidly evolving applications of FRM systems over the past five years. Our work is divided into two independent articles. This article, which is the first one, includes the basic background of FRMs, an overview of previous FRM-related surveys, and dynamic modeling methods for FRMs. The second article will review the prevalent motion planning and control methods for an FRM, together with FRM applications and perspectives.