Towards Concentric Tube Robots for Microsurgery - First Results in Eye-to-hand Visual Servoing
The Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics, pp. 77–78, 2018
Abstract
Concentric tube continuum robots (CTCR) havehigh potential in robotic surgery. Due to thesmall size and high flexibility they can reach tar-gets through small orifices along non-linear paths.Thus far, CTCR have been mainly considered forminimally invasive surgery through small incisions ornatural orifices [1]. We see them particularly promis-ing for microsurgical applications in multiple disci-plines around the head, e.g. neurosurgey, otolaryn-gology, or phoniatrics. Our vision is an integratedsetup of one or more CTCR integrated with a surgi-cal microscope to assist the physician in tasks such asbiopsy, targeted drug delivery, tissue manipulation,electrosurgery, or local imaging using US or OCT(see Fig. 1). This setup allows for semi-autonomousassistance functions to be carried out by the robotdefined by the physician in the microscopic stereo-vision (e.g. biopsy location, cutting trajectory). Asmicroscopic surgery requires high accuracy of therobot, the prevalently existing model-based controlstrategies are not suitable. This issue has recentlybeen addressed with visual servoing with eye-in-handconfiguration [2].In this paper, we propose visual servoing of a CTCR(3 tubes, 6 DOF) using a position-based look-and-move approach employing an eye-to-hand configura-tion for microsurgical applications. We evaluate theachievable absolute accuracy and demonstrate feasi-bility in an ex-vivo study with a tissue sample.