Vision-based Control of a Soft Robot for Maskless Head and Neck Cancer Radiotherapy
This addresses the need for precise and comfortable patient alignment during radiotherapy, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing sensor fusion and control methods.
The paper tackles the problem of accurate patient positioning in maskless head and neck cancer radiotherapy by developing a vision-based control system using a pneumatic soft-robot actuator, with experiments demonstrating successful manipulation of head position based on sensed pitch motion.
This work presents an on-going investigation of the control of a pneumatic soft-robot actuator addressing accurate patient positioning systems in maskless head and neck cancer radiotherapy. We employ two RGB-D sensors in a sensor fusion scheme to better estimate a patient's head pitch motion. A system identification prediction error model is used to obtain a linear time invariant state space model. We then use the model to design a linear quadratic Gaussian feedback controller to manipulate the patient head position based on sensed head pitch motion. Experiments demonstrate the success of our approach.