Hysteresis Compensation of Flexible Continuum Manipulator using RGBD Sensing and Temporal Convolutional Network
This addresses control precision for surgical robots, but it is incremental as it applies existing deep learning methods to a known bottleneck in a specific domain.
The paper tackled hysteresis control in flexible continuum manipulators for minimally invasive surgery by proposing a data-driven approach using Temporal Convolutional Networks, resulting in a 61.39% reduction in position error and 64.04% reduction in orientation error.
Flexible continuum manipulators are valued for minimally invasive surgery, offering access to confined spaces through nonlinear paths. However, cable-driven manipulators face control difficulties due to hysteresis from cabling effects such as friction, elongation, and coupling. These effects are difficult to model due to nonlinearity and the difficulties become even more evident when dealing with long and coupled, multi-segmented manipulator. This paper proposes a data-driven approach based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to capture these nonlinear and previous states-dependent characteristics of cable actuation. We collect physical joint configurations according to command joint configurations using RGBD sensing and 7 fiducial markers to model the hysteresis of the proposed manipulator. Result on a study comparing the estimation performance of four DNN models show that the Temporal Convolution Network (TCN) demonstrates the highest predictive capability. Leveraging trained TCNs, we build a control algorithm to compensate for hysteresis. Tracking tests in task space using unseen trajectories show that the proposed control algorithm reduces the average position and orientation error by 61.39% (from 13.7mm to 5.29 mm) and 64.04% (from 31.17° to 11.21°), respectively. This result implies that the proposed calibrated controller effectively reaches the desired configurations by estimating the hysteresis of the manipulator. Applying this method in real surgical scenarios has the potential to enhance control precision and improve surgical performance.