Continuum robot control strategies: from model-driven to embodied intelligence
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Updated: Sep 19, 2026

The Modular Design and Production of an Intelligent Robot Based on a Closed-Loop Control Strategy
Published on: October 14, 2017
1Anhui Research Center of Generic Technology in Photovoltaic Industry and School of Physics and Electronic Engineering, Fuyang Normal University, Fuyang 236037, People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
Continuum robots leverage intrinsic compliance and a high degree of freedom, making them well-suited for interaction in confined spaces. However, their distributed-parameter nature and pronounced nonlinearities pose major challenges for online closed-loop control. Guided by the origin of structural priors and by how control responsibilities are apportioned across the 'brain-body-environment' loop, this survey charts the spectrum from model-driven control to embodied intelligence. Specifically, we organize model-driven control into physics-based, data-driven, and hybrid paradigms; summarize model-free control in terms of task-space feedback control, online mapping estimation, and input-output adaptive methods; and review embodied intelligence control with an emphasis on morphological computation, distributed embodied sensing, policy learning and digital twins, and morphology-actuation-control co-design. This perspective provides a unified lens for synthesizing and comparing these three classes of control strategies.
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