Part
Arm architecture
You might say: serial articulated arm, snake arm, snake-like arm, tentacle arm, segmented arm, continuum arm, flexible arm
Arm architecture describes where an arm bends. Serial articulated arms have rigid links and distinct joints; hyper-redundant arms repeat many short links and joints; continuum arms bend along a continuous backbone. Soft robotics concerns compliant bodies and actuators, which can overlap with continuum construction.
- What it does
- Determines whether shape is described by joint angles or distributed bending, and which parts must carry the load.
- Ask
- Is each visible bend an actuated joint, a passive spacer or compliant section, or a continuum curve?
- Typical
- Catalogue: serial articulated; hyper-redundant/snake-like; continuum; soft-continuum overlap. Count independently actuated coordinates rather than counting ribs or cosmetic rings.
- Trouble
- Calling a ribbed exterior continuum, or calling a long segmented arm soft, can hide the load path and the model you actually need.
Catalogue: Architecture
- Serial articulated: A finite chain of rigid links and identifiable revolute or prismatic joints; this is the baseline arm topology taught in conventional manipulator kinematics.
- Hyper-redundant / snake-like: A serial arm with many short links and joints can approximate a smooth snake or tentacle silhouette; it remains a finite-joint mechanism rather than a strict continuum.
- Continuum manipulator: An actuated flexible structure is represented as a curve with continuously varying tangent; the continuum label describes the shape model, not an infinite set of motors.
- Soft robotics overlap: Soft robotics concerns compliant or deformable bodies and actuators. It overlaps with continuum robotics when the body bends continuously; the labels describe different properties of the construction.
Connections
- See also: Links and joints
- See also: Degrees of freedom
- See also: Tendon drive
Sources
- Jessica Burgner-Kahrs, Continuum Robotics 101, Continuum Robotics 101: hyper-redundant and continuum definitions
To overcome these limitation, there has been a paradigm shift away from rigid-link, discrete structures to continuously bending ones. These are commonly referred to as continuum robots.
- Jessica Burgner-Kahrs, Continuum Robotics 101, Continuum Robotics 101: boundary cases
The boundary that separates continuum robots from other snake-like or hyper-redundant manipulators is sometimes obscured by manipulator designs that use continuously bending elastic elements along with conventional discrete joints in the same structure.
- Ian D. Walker, Continuous Backbone Continuum Robot Manipulators, p. 2, Design Principles
These are sometimes termed “continuum-style” robots.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Arm architecture" (arm-architecture) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/robotics/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
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