Design and control of an aerial-ground tethered tendon-driven continuum robot with hybrid routing

Combining aerial and continuum robots harnesses both their flexibility and manoeuvrability to potentially perform dangerous maintenance tasks. However, such systems require heavy payloads to interact with its environment. An aerial-ground tethered tendon-driven continuum robot is thus proposed to tackle the limitations of on-board payload aerial systems and the underactuation of multirotors. Due to the natural limitation on the tendons used in the implementation of aerial ground tethered continuum robots, we explore the use of hybrid polynomial and parallel routes to achieve desired workspace profiles, while providing intuition on choosing suitable tendon routes. In this work, we leverage on geometrically exact methods to derive the differential kinematics of the aerial continuum robot using actuation sensors particularly for polynomial tendon routes. We demonstrate that both position and orientation can be controlled using a single stage continuum robot with hybrid tendon routing. Finally, a simple manoeuvre is executed by the aerial continuum robot prototype to validate the proposed proof of concept.