Control of a hyper-redundant robot

This paper deals with the subject of visual control of a hyper-redundant robot. This type of arm changes its configuration by bending a continuous backbone formed of sections connected in a serial configuration. Such tentacle arm has a variable length and theoretically it can achieve any position and orientation in the 3D space. A tentacle arm prototype was designed and the practical realization is now running. The mathematical modeling of such a robot takes under consideration both the kinematics and dynamics approach. A development environment for visual servoing application was designed and implemented. This environment includes both tools for simulating visual servoing algorithms (a graphic simulator), as well as tools for controlling hyper-redundant robots using a closed loop video control system. The visual servoing system does not answer in real time. The delay introduced by the image processing task is taken into consideration and simulations are performed trying to find a solution for this problem.