Identification of Whole Elastic Property of an Elastic Rod along Its Body Trunk

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an algorithm for identifying the elastic property of an elastic rod along its body trunk. The proposed algorithm estimates the stiffness matrix for bending and torsion along the backbone curve of an elastic rod based on the measured information on its shape and the forces and torques applied at its base by making full use of the discretized Kirchhoff elastic rod model. We propose a system for identifying the elastic property as well. Experimental result using an elastic strip with a known elastic property shows that the proposed method can estimate the elastic property of the rod successfully by averaging the estimated elastic values for different rod poses with the weight where elastic values estimated from straight shapes are not considered to be accurate.