Project on Continuum Robot Kinematics

CRL received a generous 5-year funding of  $385,000 within the NSERC Discovery Grant program. We are honoured to also receive NSERC's Discovery Accelerator Supplement.

The NSERC Discovery Grant program fosters high-quality research excellence by providing sustained funds to enable the pursuit of research interests with long-term goals. The NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplements are awarded to researchers who have superior, established research programs and who have the potential to become international leaders in their fields. The supplements are meant to enable researchers to capitalize on bold ideas.

Our aim of our research project is to leverage data­based approaches and deep learning techniques for modelling, computational design, and motion planning for tubular continuum robots. The long term vision is to enable technology transfer of these techniques to real­world applications of these robot, such as minimally invasive surgery, by focusing on the knowledge gaps for step change research.

In the effort of achieving this, this five­year research programme is planned around four objectives:

1. Define Data Representations for Tubular Continuum Robots
2. Investigate Deep Learning for Kinematic Modelling
3. Enable Task­Optimal Robot Designs by Reinforcement Learning
4. Explore Learning­based Motion Planning Techniques