• realization
• design
• tendon
• driven
• soft
• continuum
• twistable
• robot
• helical
• grasping
• clinging
• simulation
• robot

From the observation and study of the living beings, researchers have begun to develop bio-inspired robots. These
systems present lightweight materials, elastic elements or continuum soft bodies. current design solutions have not investigated
the action of helical tendons around soft structures and the possibility of making these robots modular. Additionally, these systems
present a hard-to-model dynamics, which makes the control problem difficult to be solved. This work proposes a design solution
for a continuum soft with tendon actuation, adding along with coaxial tendons, helical tendons. This new tendon introduced in our
design allows grasping through the body of the robot. I also address the issue of modular design to introduce a principle of scalability
and thus allowing arbitrarily long robots to be assembled by exploiting the same components. This construction methodology also
provides the possibility of using the same components with different stiffnesses and consequently opens several doors for various
optimization criteria. I show that the helical tendon also increase the dexterity and working space of the continuum robot, enabling
it to avoid obstacles and roll around objects while exerting even considerable forces. This paper also aims to propose a simplified
dynamic model to obtain feasible simulations computationally efficient which is still an open challenge for the control and simulation
of these systems. Realying on the model, I implement two tendon control algortihms for the developed system: a PD and a PD
with gravity compensation. The latter exploits the devloped model to achieve efficient computation. To verified the validity of the
design, we carry out simulations and experimental tests. We employ a prototype that allowed us to verify the validity of the design
and the model. Finally, some interesting tasks e.g. grasping and clinging are performed to show the applications of the robot.