Shape-adaptive Hysteresis Compensation for Tendon-driven Continuum Manipulators
This work addresses a practical limitation in minimally invasive surgical systems, specifically for intra-cardiac echocardiography catheters, by improving control accuracy, though it is incremental as it builds on existing models.
The paper tackled the problem of precise tip control in tendon-driven continuum manipulators (TDCM) by compensating for hysteresis caused by proximal shaft shape variations, resulting in reduced errors and improved tip manipulation accuracy in changing environments.
Tendon-driven continuum manipulators (TDCM) are commonly used in minimally invasive surgical systems due to their long, thin, flexible structure that is compliant in narrow or tortuous environments. There exist many researches for precise tip control of the articulating section. However, these models do not account for the proximal shaft shape of TDCM, affecting the tip controls in practical settings. In this paper, we propose a gradient-based shift detection method based on motor current that can easily find the offset of task space models (i.e., hysteresis). We analyze our proposed methods with multiple Intra-cardiac Echocardiography catheters, which are typical commercial example of TDCM. Our results show that the errors from varied proximal shape are considerably reduced, and the accuracy of the tip manipulation is improved when changing external environmental structures.