Kinematics analysis, motion planning and control of the continuum manipulator in minimally invasive surgery

Due to its unique dexterity, flexibility, and safety, continuum manipulator is more suitable for the detection, diagnosis, and maintenance in complex, narrow, and unstructured constrained environment. This paper presented a new cable-driven flexible endoscope robot for diagnosis and treatment, and its kinematics model, motion planning and control performance were systematically studied. First of all, the kinematics model of the proposed continuum manipulator was established by D-H method, and the workspace was analyzed based on the improved Monte Carlo method. In order to make the multi-segment continuum robot safety and quickly intervene into the target area, a motion planning method was proposed by using the ridge method under the constraints of the navigation path. In other words, the minimum distance between the beginning point, middle point and distal point of the robot and the theoretical trajectory points was taken as the optimization function, the configuration parameters of each bending segment were solved by inverse recursion to control the robot move along the pre-given navigation path. Then, the motion planning simulations of the plane path and spatial path were carried out to verify the proposed motion planning method. Finally, the experimental prototype of the proposed endoscopic robot was set up to verify the feasibility of the proposed continuum structure and the correctness of the established model, which can be used as a feedback control and navigation reference.