Software Abstractions for Simulation and Control of a Continuum Robot

The Bionic Handling Assistant is a new continuum robot which is manufactured in a rapid-prototyping procedure out of elastic polyamide. Its mechanical flexibility and low weight provide an enormous potential for physical human robot interaction. Yet, the elasticity and parallel continuum actuation design challenge standard approaches to deal with a robot from a control, simulation, and software modeling perspective. We investigate how the software abstractions of the existing Robot Control Interface (RCI) and the Compliant Control Architecture (CCA) can deal with this platform from a software modeling and software architectural perspective. We focus on three different challenges: the first challenge is to enable reasonable and hierarchical semantic abstractions of the robot. The second challenge is to develop hardware I/O abstractions for the prototypical and heterogeneous technical setup. The third challenge is to realize this in a flexible and reusable manner. We evaluate our approaches to the above challenges in a practical scenario in which the robot is controlled either in simulation or on the real robot.