Kinematics of Hyper-Redundant Manipulators

A "hyper-redundant" manipulator is a redundant manipulator with a large or infinite relative degree of redundancy. This paper presents a novel approach to the forward and inverse kinematics of these manipulators which is based on the differential geometry of curves. In this method, a 'backbone curve' is defined to capture the essential geometric features of the hyper-redundant manipulator. The backbone curve's intrinsic geometric functions are restricted to a modal form in order to resolve the hyper-redundancy. The approach is directly applicable to manipulators with continuous morphology, and can be extended to manipulators with a finite number of discrete links.