Data-Driven Control for Continuum Robots Based on Discrete Zeroing Neural Networks

The effectiveness of continuous-time zeroing neural network (ZNN) (CZNN) in continuum robot control has been preliminarily verified. However, CZNN is not friendly to digital devices and hardware implementation. Although discrete ZNN (DZNN) has been investigated in other tasks, all the existing DZNNs are designed with fixed time steps, which cannot meet the needs of different tasks. This motivates us to develop a generic DZNN model with variable number of time steps and apply it to continuum robot control. In this article, we present a data-driven scheme based on CZNNs to learn the unknown kinematics of continuum robots and solve the kinematic control problem. Furthermore, a unified <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$m$</tex-math></inline-formula> -step forward discretization formula is derived to discretize the CZNN-based scheme into DZNN-based control algorithms. Finally, we take the 1-step and the 3-step algorithms as examples to show the discretization process, and verify their efficacy by simulations and experiments.