Ian D. Walker's research while affiliated with Clemson University and other places

... To be effective, these arms need to be able to generate sufficient force on the environment to prevent the fall, but also be sufficiently compliant to avoid the propagation of impact forces through the arms to the human. To meet these objectives we selected continuum arms [22], [23], built from pneumatically actuated artificial muscles. Continuous-bodied continuum robots are particularly suitable for this application due to their simple design, smooth profile and, particularly, their inherent compliance, which enables stable dynamic impacts with the environment [24]. ...

... As the size of the robot's body is not constrained by the size of the motors, the diameter of the cross-section can be extremely small. 12 As one of the extrinsic actuation modes, tendon-driven continuum robots (TCR) can be used for special tasks such as minimally invasive surgery and detection of narrow spaces. OC Robotics, 13 a snake-like continuum robot, can enter extreme environments to perform tasks, using the cabledriven method and the principle of wire rope traction for motion control. ...

... They offer better control over their workspace [9], [10] which allows for complex motion patterns. The redundancy in their degrees of freedom determines their built-in fault tolerance due to the fact that the robot can still be operable and perform tasks even under the conditions of one or more kinematic chains failure [11][12][13]. It is worth mentioning their compact design and minimized motor mass which leads to improving dynamics and energy efficiency [14], [15]. ...

... It is noteworthy that the versatility of continuum manipulators (CMs) extends beyond the medical field. Research and implementations have showcased the suitability of CMs in diverse domains, including inspection and maintenance, fluid delivery applications, operations in hazardous environments, object manipulation, and cleaning [63][64][65][66]. ...

... In contrast, the issue of identifying cable failure is barely discussed in the literature and just one work addresses this issue, to the best of the author's knowledge. A failure identification process, together with a proper recovery strategy, is proposed in [10] for a planar reconfigurable CDPR; in particular, the pose estimation of the end-effector is combined with the failure detection through the exploitation of an Interactive Multiple Model (IMM) algorithm, which relies only on the information regarding the end-effector. The IMM algorithm consists in the application of a parallel bank of filters (usually, Extended Kalman Filters), each of them corresponding to one of the different failure modes; clearly, the number of possible failure modes increases in a nonlinear way with the number of cables and, as a consequence, the dimension of the parallel bank of filters increases as well, leading to a greater computational burden. ...