ORCID

Abstract

The existing model-based control strategies for tendon-driven continuum soft robots neglect the dynamics of the actuation system. Nevertheless, such dynamics have an important impact on the closed-loop performance. This work analyzes the influence of the actuation dynamics in tendon-driven continuum soft robots performing trajectory-tracking tasks. To this end, we use singular perturbation (SP) theory to design controllers that account for such dynamics. We provide the analytical formulation of the SP controllers and their in-depth experimental validation. Additionally, we use high-and low-stiffness tendons to experimentally compare the performance of the proposed SP controllers against traditional feedback control schemes that disregard the actuation dynamics. The experimental results show that SP controllers outperform the approaches that neglect the actuation dynamics by reducing oscillations and achieving lower errors without relying on high gains. Furthermore, it is shown that neglecting the actuation dynamics may lead to instability when the tendons have a low stiffness coefficient.

Publication Date

2025-03-11

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology

Volume

33

Issue

5

ISSN

2374-0159

Acceptance Date

2025-02-22

Deposit Date

2025-03-14

Funding

This work was supported by German Research Foundation (DFG), as part of the Priority Program 2100 Soft Material Robotic Systems under Grant 405032572. The work of Cosimo Della Santina was supported by the Horizon Europe Program from Project EMERGE under Grant 101070918.

Keywords

Soft robotics, Robots, Tendons, Vectors, Aerodynamics, Motors, Actuators, Trajectory, Frequency modulation, Jacobian matrices, singular perturbation, Continuum soft robots, model-based control, tendon-driven robots

First Page

1929

Last Page

1936

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