Towards closed loop control of a continuum robotic manipulator for medical applications

Robotic catheters are gaining widespread use in the medical community for cardiac, neurological and other surgical interventions. However, many of the catheters used in these procedures exhibit non-linear behavior, and thus present many difficulties in implementing effective open-loop control. Systems such as this have been shown to benefit from closed-loop control, however very little investigation has been done into 3D closed loop control of this class of manipulators. Initial investigations by the authors have shown greatly improved positioning accuracy and response with closed-loop control based on feedback from an electromagnetic localization sensor. This paper describes the control approach and experimental results, and provides a robotic catheter system overview.