Experiments with Tentacle Robots

An ideal tentacle manipulator is a non-conventional robotic arm with an infinite mobility. It has the capability of taking sophisticated shapes and of achieving any position and orientation in a 3D space. A tentacle manipulator is a hyper redundant or hyper degree of freedom manipulator. Hyper redundant robots produce changes of configuration using a continuous backbone made of sections which bend. The lack of no discrete joints is a serious and difficult issue in the determination of the robot's shape. A solution for this problem is the vision based control of the robot, kinematics and dynamics. A tentacle arm prototype was designed and the practical realization is now running. The control system is an image based visual servo control where the error control signal is defined directly in terms of image feature parameters.