Inverse kinematics of discretely actuated hyper-redundant manipulators

The term discretely actuated hyper-redundant manipulator is applied to a kind of manipulators which consists of serially connected modules. Such modules are composed of discretely actuated joints having finite stable states. Since the previous studies have rarely offered satisfactory results regarding the problem of inverse kinematics of discretely actuated hyper-redundant manipulators, the present study is attempting to develop and investigate an effective algorithm to solve this problem. To achieve this, the current research intends to solve the problem of 2D and 3D inverse kinematics of manipulators with many modules, by considering both position and orientation of end frame in real-time with fairly high accuracy. The main ideas of the proposed method are: using mean workspace, breadth-first search with two non-adjacent modules in each step and improving the results by iterating the process. The effectiveness of the presented method is verified through different numerical analyses for various case studies.