Position and Orientation Control of Multisection Magnetic Soft Microcatheters

Soft continuum robots (CRs) can be potentially applied in minimally invasive surgery due to their slender continuously deformable bodies. However, miniaturization, dexterity, and control accuracy remain as targets and challenges for medical soft CRs. In this article, we present a control strategy for a minimalist structured multisection magnetic continuum robot (MCR) to show its dexterous and accurate motion ability. The robot is embedded with two opposite axially polarized magnets. This makes it capable of deforming in a higher order curve under the influence of an external mobile magnet. This minimalist structure is suitable for submillimeter steerable microcatheters, and facilitates micromanipulation in hard-to-access region of the body. Using a Jacobian-based inverse kinematics method, the robot realizes tip position and orientation control, as well as multisection control in three dimensions with the accuracy of up to 1.30 ± 0.48 mm and 2.8 ± 1.0°. Furthermore, we showcase various medical applications of our proposed MCR for dexterous navigation, orthogonal motion, and pivoting motion. Our article aims to demonstrate dexterous and accurate motion capability of the proposed multisection magnetic soft microcatheter, which helps execute significant robotic tasks in real-world clinical applications.