Experiments on physical continuum robot are the gold standard for evaluations. Currently, as no commercial continuum robot platform is available, a large variety of early-stage prototypes exists. These prototypes are developed by individual research groups and are often used for a single publication. Thus, a significant amount of time is devoted to creating proprietary hardware and software hindering the development of a common platform, and shifting away scarce time and efforts from the main research challenges. We address this problem by proposing an open-source actuation module, which can be used to build different types of continuum robots. It consists of a high-torque brushless electric motor, a high resolution optical encoder, and a low-gear-ratio transmission. For this letter, we create three different types of continuum robots. In addition, we illustrate, for the first time, that continuum robots built with our actuation module can proprioceptively detect external forces. Consequently, our approach opens untapped and under-investigated research directions related to the dynamics and advanced control of continuum robots, where sensing the generalized flow and effort is mandatory. Besides that, we democratize continuum robots research by providing open-source software and hardware with our initiative called the Open Continuum Robotics Project, to increase the accessibility and reproducibility of advanced methods.

翻译：针对物理连续体机器人的实验是评估的金标准。目前，由于缺乏商用连续体机器人平台，存在大量早期原型机。这些原型机由各研究团队独立开发，且通常仅用于单一出版物。因此，大量时间被投入创建专有硬件和软件，阻碍了通用平台的发展，并转移了本应用于主要研究挑战的稀缺时间和精力。我们通过提出一个开源驱动模块来应对这一问题，该模块可用于构建不同类型的连续体机器人。它由一个高扭矩无刷电机、一个高分辨率光学编码器和一个低减速比传动装置组成。在本文中，我们使用该模块构建了三种不同类型的连续体机器人。此外，我们首次证明，使用我们的驱动模块构建的连续体机器人能够通过本体感知检测外部力。因此，我们的方法开辟了与连续体机器人动力学和高级控制相关的尚未探索且被低估的研究方向，在这些方向中，感知广义流和广义力是必不可少的。除此之外，我们通过名为“开放连续体机器人项目”的倡议提供开源软件和硬件，以促进先进方法的可访问性和可复现性，从而推动连续体机器人研究的民主化。