Designing Robots for Reachability and Dexterity: Continuum Surgical Robots as a Pretext Application

This article contributes a novel method to assess robot dexterity. Existing Jacobian-based dexterity metrics, such as the manipulability index or the condition number, do not allow for comparisons between robot architectures, are local in nature, and are affected by robot dimensions (robot size). On the contrary, the introduced metric is global and allows for quantitative comparisons of robot architectures as it explicitly incorporates the orientational and positional coverage of a robot's end-effector. Experiments presented show that the proposed dexterity metric can improve the computational and precision performance of numerical inverse kinematics and showcase its suitability for use in computational dexterous robot design and, in particular, for designing concentric tube robots with high orientational and positional dexterity.