Tendon-Driven Continuum Robot for Endoscopic Surgery: Preclinical Development and Validation of a Tension Propagation Model

In this paper, we present a tendon-driven continuum robot for endoscopic surgery. The robot has two sections for articulation actuated by tendon wires. By actuating the two sections independently, the robot can generate a variety of tip positions while maintaining the tip direction. This feature offers more flexibility in positioning the tip for large viewing angles of up to 180° than does a conventional endoscope. To accurately estimate the tip position at large viewing angles, we employed kinematic mapping with a tension propagation model including friction between the tendon wires and the robot body. In a simulation study using this kinematic mapping, the two-section robot at a target scale (outer diameter 1.7 mm and length 60 mm) produced a variety of tip positions within 50-mm ranges at the 180° angle view. In the experimental validation, a 10:1 scale prototype performed three salient postures with different tip positions at the 180° angle view. The proposed forward kinematic mapping (FKM) predicted the tip position within a tip-to-tip error of 6 mm over the 208-mm articulating length. The tip-to-tip error by FKM was significantly less than the one by conventional piecewise-constant-curvature approximation (FKM: 5.9 ± 2.9 mm versus PCCA: 23.7 ± 3.6 mm, n = 15, P <; 0.01).