Modeling and Control of a Continuum Style Microrobot for Endovascular Surgery

This paper presents a microrobot of continuum type that satisfies constraints in terms of degrees of freedom, size, and safety for endovascular surgery. The proposed instrument, which integrates multiple microrobots and a catheter, is called the Multi Active LInk CAtheter (MALICA). Its structure is redundant, compliant, and compact, which makes it a well-suited solution to control the catheter shape. In this paper, we focus on a single microrobot and its actuation to control the orientation of the catheter´s distal extremity. The kinematic and differential kinematic models of the microrobot are developed. Because of its kinematic redundancy, the orientation control is formulated as an optimization problem. A differential model-based control scheme is proposed and experimentally validated.