A method is presented for generating inverse kinematic solutions for hyper-redundant manipulators of fixed or variable length. This method uses a continuous backbone curve to capture the macroscopic geometric features of the manipulator. The inverse kinematics of the backbone curve can be used directly to specify the geometry of a wide variety of hyper-redundant manipulator morphologies. The hyper-redundant manipulators are broken nonredundant segments which have closed form inverse kinematic solutions. The kinematic constraints for each segment are specified independently by the backbone curve, and the kinematics of the total manipulator can therefore be solved in parallel. The method is demonstrated with planar and spatial variable geometry truss manipulators.
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