Safety and Energy-Aware Impedance Control of a Continuum Robot with Vision-based Manipulation

Ensuring the safety of interaction targets is paramount in robot interaction tasks, yet achieving this is particularly challenging with continuum manipulators due to their complex and highly nonlinear dynamics. To address this challenge, we propose a safety and energy-aware impedance control framework for robot interaction, which integrates a Vision Transformer (ViT) for target object recognition and is specifically designed for continuum manipulators with variable stiffness characteristics in both tilt and pan motions. This framework employs a dual-event triggering mechanism based on impedance control to enhance the safety and energy awareness of robot interaction systems. This mechanism adaptively adjusts the stiffness and damping coefficients when energy exceeds the object-specific thresholds determined through ViT classification, ensuring safe interaction levels and significantly enhancing the safety of interaction targets. Additionally, the incorporation of passivity theories and energy-tank methods further assures stability, preventing unintended energy generation and maintaining asymptotic stability throughout interactions. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated through collaborative operation experiments on a continuum manipulator, demonstrating its capability to ensure that interaction targets remain within safe energy levels in real-world applications. The proposed framework integrates ViT and dual-event triggered impedance control to ensure safe and energy-aware interactions with targets on continuum manipulators.