Kinematics and Teleoperation of Tendon Driven Continuum Robot

Abstract Applications of continuum robots in the field of medical robotics have been advancing at a staggering pace due to their inherent compliance and hyper-flexibility. The ability to glide through complex curvilinear pathways makes them ideally suitable to endoscopic and surgical procedures. Virtual reality guided medical interventions on the other hand have gathered immense popularity due to interactive and immersive visualization of the procedure being performed. In this paper we discuss the kinematics and teleoperation of a tendon driven continuum robot with virtual reality guidance which may prove beneficial for performing endoscopic and minimally invasive surgical procedures remotely and efficiently. In this study we derive the inverse kinematics for the proposed continuum robot and develop an inverse kinematic controller for open loop control using Phantom Omni Haptic device as 3D joystick. The performance of the open loop system was evaluated by drawing basic geometrical shapes and the tracking errors were recorded. We also performed the teleoperation in real time and the average latency found was around 650ms making for five successive experiments which show the potential to use the system for minimally invasive surgeries.