Development of a novel robotic catheter manipulating system

Manual operation of steerable catheter is inaccurate in minimally invasive surgery and requires dexterity for efficient manipulation of the catheter meanwhile exposes the surgeons to intense radiation. In this paper, our objective is to develop a remote control system that replaces the manipulation of surgeons with high accuracy. Increasing demands for flexibility and fast reactions in control method, fuzzy control can play an important role because the experience of experts can be combined in the fuzzy control rules to be implemented in the systems. We present a practical application of fuzzy PID controller for this developed system during the remote operations and compare with the traditional PID control experimentally. The feasibility and effectiveness of the control method are demonstrated. The performance using the fuzzy PID control is much better than using the conventional control method.