Safe Path Planning for a Continuum Robot for Surgical Applications

Abstract

With the rapid advancements both in technology and in the area of surgery, a natural merger has taken place by taking the advantages of robotics for the treatment of patients. Class of robots with no rigid links/joints and present continuous bending in architecture, are called continuum robots. Continuum robots possess great potential in many challenging applications, where traditional rigid link robots pose certain limitations e.g. working in unstructured congested workspaces etc. For the usage of continuum robots in safety critical applications, such as surgeries and nuclear decontamination, it becomes extremely important to ensure the safe path for robot’s movement. Existing algorithms for the path planning of continuum robots pose certain limitations that need to be addressed, e.g. none of the algorithm provides safety parameters, assurance and control for path planning. They are computationally expensive, applicable to specific type of continuum robots, and mostly do not incorporate design and kinematics constraints. In this thesis, we propose the points based path planning (PoPP) algorithm for continuum robots that computes the path by imposing safety constraints and cater the limitations of existing approaches. In the algorithm, we exploits constant curvature bending property of continuum robots for their path planning. Algorithm is computationally efficient and provides a good tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency that can be exploited for safety critical applications of continuum robots. Algorithm also provides the information of path volume and flexibility in movement. Simulation results show that algorithm possess promising potential of applications for all types of continuum robots (following constant curvature bending property for their manipulator) to achieve desired safety with efficiency. Toward the contribution of this thesis, we also propose single sensor based path planning (SSPP) algorithm, which can be used for the path planning of continuum robots in static environments using the input from single sensor. SSPP algorithm inherit novelties attached with PoPP algorithm.