The 'elephant trunk' manipulator, design and implementation

Over that last several years, research in the area of hyper-redundant robots and those robots based on tentacle/trunk type manipulators has become of great interest. Though much progress has been obtained in both the areas of robot construction and robot kinematics, there has been little progress in the implementation of a kinematic model for motion on a physical robot. We review both our 'elephant trunk' robot's construction and our previously designed kinematic model. We provide experimental results verifying not only the legitimacy of our kinematic model, but also the real time implementation of the model on the physical robot.