Robot control via output regulation in Cardiac Surgery

Robot-assisted Cardiac Surgery has remarkably helped surgeons to operate on a beating heart. The robot is preferred to move simultaneously with a point of interest (POI) on the heart surface such that surgeons are enabled to operate as if the heart is stationary. Hence an output regulation technique is proposed in this paper for the surgical robot to track the heart motion without exactly knowing the reference heart motion. Simulations are used to demonstrate its advantage over model predictive control.