This work investigates the position regulation in Cartesian space of a class of inextensible soft continuum manipulators with pneumatic actuation subject to model uncertainties and to unknown external disturbances that act on the tip. Soft continuum manipulators are characterised by high structural compliance which results in a large number of degrees-of-freedom, only a subset of which can be actuated independently or instrumented with sensors. External disturbances, which are common in many applications, result in uncertain dynamics and in uncertain kinematics thus making the control problem particularly challenging. We have investigated the use of integral action to model the uncertain kinematics of the manipulators, and we have designed a new control law to achieve position regulation in Cartesian space by employing a port-Hamiltonian formulation and a passivity-based approach. In addition, we have compared two adaptive laws that compensate the effects of the external disturbances on the system dynamics. Local stability conditions are discussed with a Lyapunov approach and are related to the controller parameters. The performance of the controller is demonstrated by means of simulations and experiments with two different prototypes.

这项工作研究了一类具有模型的不确定性和作用在尖端上的未知外部扰动的具有气动致动的不可扩展的软连续性机械手在笛卡尔空间中的位置调节。软连续性机械手的特点是结构顺应性高，从而导致大量的自由度，其中只有一部分可以独立致动或配备传感器。在许多应用中常见的外部干扰会导致不确定的动力学和运动学的不确定性，因此使控制问题特别具有挑战性。我们研究了使用积分作用来建模机械手的不确定运动学，并且我们设计了一种新的控制定律，通过采用哈密尔顿拟定公式和基于被动性的方法来实现笛卡尔空间中的位置调节。此外，我们比较了两种自适应定律，这些定律可以补偿外部干扰对系统动力学的影响。使用Lyapunov方法讨论了局部稳定性条件，并且该条件与控制器参数有关。控制器的性能通过两个不同原型的仿真和实验得以证明。