Tendon-Driven Continuum Robot Stiffness with Pretension Effect

The stiffness analysis of tendon-driven continuum robots is highly demanded in human-robot interaction applications. Although pretension is a common approach to enhance the stiffness of these robots with tendon-displacement-controlled strategies, investigating and analyzing the relationship between stiffness and pretension is challenging. To address this, we proposed a novel Cosserat rod-based model for tendon-driven continuum robots, which takes into account both tendon displacement and tendon elasticity constraints. Through simulation tests, we established the relationship between stiffness analysis and the pretension effect based on the proposed methods.