A tele-operated robotic platform for cardiovascular catheter intervention with haptic guidance

This paper presents a tele-operated robotic platform for cardiac catheterization that is one of minimally invasive intervention procedures mostly used in cardiac ablation and stent implantation. The robotic cardiac catheter navigation systems have been developed to facilitate more accurate and precise catheter navigation. The system proposed in this study was designed to be compatible with conventional cardiac ablation catheters. The master manipulator implements force feedback using force/torque signal either measured by a sensor or estimated from the motor current signal in the slave manipulator. The slave manipulator with three DOF implements a robotic catheter control platform in which conventional cardiac catheter is installed and the motions such as forward/backward movement, rolling, and catheter tip bending are controlled. The system runs on a realtime-based software that implements synchronized control of the master-slave motion. The synchronization performance was evaluated for step, sinusoidal, and arbitrarily varying motion commands and the result showed the proposed system successfully achieved the tele-operated motion control function.