ICRA 2021 videos are now available. Watch Jessica Burgner-Kahrs’ keynote below!
ABSTRACT – While the first true continuum robot dates back to the mid-sixties, the field experienced great advancements only in this century as design principles and modelling approaches matured. Continuum robots have the potential to radically improve innovation across multiple applications — from surgery to industrial inspection and maintenance to exploration — but this paradigm shift entails moving beyond discrete articulated robot bodies to continuously bending ones, where softness and deformability raise major challenges and where many scientific questions remain unanswered. Compared to traditional hard-bodied robots, the high flexibility and compliance of continuum robots makes designing and controlling them far more complex. In this talk, we will review advances in continuum robots’ physical and computational design, state-of-the-art physics-based and emerging learning-based modelling methods, as well as motion planning and control in light of their high degrees of freedom. The opportunity space for future research will also be explored.
Did you miss any of the other keynotes or plenaries at ICRA? The ICRA 2021 Program Committee has made videos of the plenaries and keynotes available for download. Check them out.