Breathing motion compensation for robot assisted laser osteotomy

This article proposes a control scheme for robot assisted laser osteotomy. Laser osteotomy consists in cutting a bone precisely with a laser. To achieve accurate cuts the laser has to be precisely sent to a desired pose with respect to the bone. In the proposed approach, a robot is used to position an end-effector with a scanhead, which deflects the cutting laser. The poses of the laser and of the bone are measured thanks to an optical tacking system which tracks the positions of optical markers placed on the bone and on the scanhead. The control of the robot is then performed thanks to a position-based visual servoing control scheme. In the case of bones affected by breathing motions, for instance the thorax bones, this control scheme is enhanced with a learning algorithm in order to compensate breathing motions. The main contribution of this paper is this control algorithm for motions compensation.