Construction of Controller Model of Notch Continuum Manipulator for Laryngeal Surgery Based on Hybrid Method

The laryngeal surgery is usually performed with rigid surgical instruments. However, those instruments inevitably cause tissue damage. A novel notch continuum manipulator for laryngeal surgery is proposed. The deformation of the notch continuum manipulator is highly nonlinear. The controller is difficult to construct. The model-based modeling strategy from micro to macro is adopted for forward kinematics. The proposed notch continuum manipulator is modeled as a series of flexible units. Based on the mechanical model and Denavit-Hartenberg method, the mapping from the driven space to the Cartesian space is constructed. The model-free strategy based on the forward kinematics and machine learning is adopted to provide an approximate solution for the inverse kinematics. Therefore, combining the advantages of model-free and model-based strategies, a hybrid method can be proposed to accurately model and solve the kinematics of a class of continuum manipulators. The experimental results obtained through the prototype show that the proposed controller model can meet the actual engineering requirement.