Design and Analysis of Compliant Continuum Robots for Suturing

Compliant continuum robots are a class of manipulators that show a deviation in design and operation from the general category of rigid body manipulators. They possess high degrees of freedom, capable of changing shape along their length. Due to these characteristics of continuum robots, it is an ideal choice for minimally invasive surgical manipulators. In this paper, various fully compliant continuum robot designs have been proposed, optimized, analyzed, and compared for this sole purpose. The classical single backbone structure was considered the benchmark for comparison. The cross-axis flexure dual backbone continuum tooltip has performed well, showing 63.8% better displacement than the benchmark.