title: A Motion Planning Approach to Automatic Obstacle Avoidance during Concentric Tube Robot Teleoperation.
abstract: Concentric tube robots are thin, tentacle-like devices that can move along curved paths and can potentially enable new, less invasive surgical procedures. Safe and effective operation of this type of robot requires that the robot's shaft avoid sensitive anatomical structures (e.g., critical vessels and organs) while the surgeon teleoperates the robot's tip. However, the robot's unintuitive kinematics makes it difficult for a human user to manually ensure obstacle avoidance along the entire tentacle-like shape of the robot's shaft. We present a motion planning approach for concentric tube robot teleoperation that enables the robot to interactively maneuver its tip to points selected by a user while automatically avoiding obstacles along its shaft. We achieve automatic collision avoidance by precomputing a roadmap of collision-free robot configurations based on a description of the anatomical obstacles, which are attainable via volumetric medical imaging. We also mitigate the effects of kinematic modeling error in reaching the goal positions by adjusting motions based on robot tip position sensing. We evaluate our motion planner on a teleoperated concentric tube robot and demonstrate its obstacle avoidance and accuracy in environments with tubular obstacles.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
authors.forename: Luis G
authors.initials: LG
authors.lastname: Torres
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
authors.forename: Alan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kuntz
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235, USA.
authors.forename: Hunter B
authors.initials: HB
authors.lastname: Gilbert
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235, USA.
authors.forename: Philip J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Swaney
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235, USA.
authors.forename: Richard J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Hendrick
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235, USA.
authors.forename: Robert J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Webster
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
authors.forename: Ron
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Alterovitz