Design and Characterization of a Unified Continuum Robot Actuation Platform

This research presents a unified actuation platform for continuum robots that decouples hardware and software from robot design, enabling modular actuation across different classes and scales. The platform is validated on an open-sourced surgical robotic system, achieving sub-millimeter translational accuracy and less than 5° rotational error. It is demonstrated in two surgical use cases, with all hardware and ROS-based software open-sourced for further research.