Compliance of Continuum Wrists

In (Shihora et al., 2025), we explore kinematic and compliance properties of wire-actuated continuum wrists. The main contribution of this work, led by Dr. Neel Shihora, was to explicitly define tension-transition zones for these devices and to explore the comparative performance of 3-wire vs. 4-wire designs.

My contribution of this work was to examine the compliance of these devices subject to end-effector loading throughout it’s workspace. This included modeling the statics of this device, subject to the tension-transition zones, and further computing their stiffness and compliance matrices. The comparative performance for the designs was quantified with end-effector deflection in position and orientation (shown in the below figure).