Page 290 - Flexible Robotics in Medicine

280 Chapter 12

Table 12.5: Workspace radius and sweep angle of a two-bending section flexible manipulator.
Radius Sweep angle
Bending section 1 L 1 1 L 2 θ 1 1 θ 2
Bending section 2 L 3 1 L 4 θ 3 1 θ 4

Figure 12.8
The figure on the right indicates the reachable workspace of the estimated flexible manipulator
and the figure on the left indicates the construction of the workspace of the flexible manipulator.
D 2 is the diameter of the workspace of the second bending section. The first bending section is
the bending section in red, whereas the second bending section is defined by the green section.

Table 12.6: Workspace for the flexible manipulator in a two-dimensional plane (x y).

The workspace for the x y plane is the same as the workspace in the x z plane.

The degree of difficulty in manipulating the shapes depends on the number of bending
sections and bending planes. For example, the left S-shape has the highest degree of
difficulty, as it involves two sections bending at different bending planes, as shown in
Fig. 12.9. The plots in Fig. 12.10 indicate that as the shape gets complicated, more time is
required to achieve the shape construction. The slope of the trend lines from the trial plots
in Fig. 12.10 indicates a variation of 6 3.714 seconds, which implies that the time taken to
repeat the manipulation of the shape is relatively the same over the three trials conducted.