Shape sensing and feedback control of the catheter robot for interventional surgery

Purpose This paper aims to present a shape sensing method and feedback control strategy based on fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor to improve the control accuracy of the robot and ensure the safety of the cardiac interventional surgery. Design/methodology/approach To theoretically describe the shape of the catheter robot, the kinematic model is established by the geometric analysis method. And to obtain the actual shape, a large curvature assemble sensor based on FBG is adopted and a novel simple shape reconstruction model is proposed, which can provide the shape curve and distal position. In addition, the influence of external load on the bending deformation is investigated by experiments. To improve the shape accuracy of the robot, a shape feedback control method is presented to control the catheter robot, which can control the robot to bend into the pre-given desired shape. Findings Experiment results verify the effectiveness of the shape sensing method and the reconstruction model, and the correlation coefficients of three sets of curve in different coordinate directions are 0.9986, 0.9992 and 0.9999. Results of the shape feedback experiment show that the curvature error and direction angle error are 1.42% and 10.3%, respectively. The continuum catheter robot can be controlled to achieve the desired bending shape. Originality/value The shape reconstruction method and feedback control strategy proposed in this paper can improve the control accuracy of the robot to avoid the risk of the collision with the surrounding blood vessels, the tissues and organs.