The past decade has witnessed accelerated growth of medical robotics and computer-assisted medical technologies that rely on dexterous tools to enable new surgical procedures. Lately, there has been a growing trend of adopting continuum robots as a design solution for dexterous intervention. These robots present modeling and control challenges beyond the standard modeling and control paradigms for rigid-link serial robots. This half-day workshop that is targeted towards graduate students interested in pursuing research in the area of continuum robot modeling, control and applications. The workshop will cover surgical applications, kinematic and static modeling, sensing, and control of these robots.
A detailed planned workshop agenda is available here .
The workshop will discuss the three types of continuum robots: wire-actuate single backbone, concentric tube, and multi-backbone continuum robots. Wire-actuated continuum robots use wires to bend a central continuum backbone. Multi backbone robots use push-pull actuation of a multitude of beams to achieve their equilibrium shapes. Concentric-tube robots use concentric combination of pre-curved elastic tubes and the robot motion is achieved by the rotation and extension of the tubes with respect to each other. After a presentation of history and motivations for recent applications of continuum robots, the workshop will focus on multi-backbone designs which have found extensive usage for dexterity enhancement in many surgical applications including otolaryngology, transurethral bladder surgery and single port access surgery.
The main focus of this workshop is to review research works on modeling, control and applications of multi-backbone continuum robots. The workshop will consist of four parts:
1. Introduction to continuum robots: history and overview of continuum robot architectures. After presenting some of the early works, we will discuss applications of continuum robots with emphasis on recent surgical applications including single port access and natural orifice surgery.
2. Modeling of continuum robot statics and kinematics: selected modeling works on all three types of continuum robots with an emphasis on multi-backbone type will be presented.
3. Sensing and interaction control: we will cover recent advances in intrinsic wrench and contact estimation/sensing using a modeling framework for continuum robots with multiple backbones. Interaction control will include stiffness modeling and active compliant motion control for continuum robots. Finally, we will present a framework for hybrid force/motion control of continuum robots.
4. Actuation compensation and friction estimation for continuum robots: we will review methods for actuation compensation and estimation of intrinsic friction parameters including our prior and current works. We will also discuss kinematic error prorogation and calibration.
A combined print is available here. The followings are the paper links:
1. Simaan, Nabil. "Snake-like units using flexible backbones and actuation redundancy for enhanced miniaturization." Robotics and Automation, 2005. ICRA 2005. Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2005.
2. Xu, Kai, and Nabil Simaan. "An investigation of the intrinsic force sensing capabilities of continuum robots." IEEE Transactions on Robotics 24.3 (2008): 576-587.
3. Simaan, Nabil, et al. "Design and integration of a telerobotic system for minimally invasive surgery of the throat." The International journal of robotics research 28.9 (2009): 1134-1153.
4. Zhang, Jian, et al. "Optimal path planning for robotic insertion of steerable electrode arrays in cochlear implant surgery." Journal of medical devices 3.1 (2009): 011001.
5. Xu, Kai, and Nabil Simaan. "Intrinsic wrench estimation and its performance index for multisegment continuum robots." IEEE Transactions on Robotics 26.3 (2010): 555-561.
6. Wei, Wei, and Nabil Simaan. "Modeling, force sensing, and control of flexible cannulas for microstent delivery." Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control 134.4 (2012): 041004.
7. Bajo, Andrea, and Nabil Simaan. "Kinematics-based detection and localization of contacts along multisegment continuum robots." IEEE Transactions on Robotics 28.2 (2012): 291-302.
8. Goldman, Roger E., Andrea Bajo, and Nabil Simaan. "Compliant motion control for multisegment continuum robots with actuation force sensing." IEEE Transactions on Robotics 30.4 (2014): 890-902.
9. Bajo, Andrea, and Nabil Simaan. "Hybrid motion/force control of multi-backbone continuum robots." The International journal of robotics research 35.4 (2016): 422-434.
10. Roy, Rajarshi, Long Wang, and Nabil Simaan. "Modeling and Estimation of Friction, Extension, and Coupling Effects in Multisegment Continuum Robots." IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics 22.2 (2017): 909-920.