Modeling and Control of a Continuum Style Microrobot for Endovascular Surgery

This paper presents a microrobot of continuum type that satisfies constraints in terms of degrees of freedom, size, and safety for endovascular surgery. The proposed instrument, which integrates multiple microrobots and a catheter, is called the Multi Active LInk CAtheter (MALICA). Its structure is redundant, compliant, and compact, which makes it a well-suited solution to control the catheter shape. In this paper, we focus on a single microrobot and its actuation to control the orientation of the catheter's distal extremity. The kinematic and differential kinematic models of the microrobot are developed. Because of its kinematic redundancy, the orientation control is formulated as an optimization problem. A differential model-based control scheme is proposed and experimentally validated.