Design and Characterization of a Unified Continuum Robot Actuation Platform

arXiv:2610.19798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuum robots enable dexterous access to confined spaces in applications such as minimally invasive surgery and industrial inspection. However, their actuation systems are often custom-designed for specific robot architectures and tasks, limiting reuse across publications, institutions, and applications. This paper presents a unified actuation platform that decouples actuation hardware and software from continuum robot design. The platform provides modular actuation across continuum robot classes, scales to a large number of degrees of freedom (DOFs), and integrates with conventional serial manipulators for hybrid architectures. We validate the platform on an open-sourced surgical robotic system and experimentally characterize the actuation modules, achieving sub-millimeter translational accuracy and less than 5^irc rotational error over ranges of 30mm and 180^irc, respectively. We further demonstrate the platform in two surgical use cases: teleoperation of a continuum camera in a constrained environment and bimanual manipulation using 2.53mm concentric-tube-robot-based forceps alongside a conventional wristed instrument. All hardware designs and ROS-based software are open-sourced to facilitate reuse and further research in continuum and surgical robotics.

Source: arXiv cs.RO | 2026-10-15