Orientation Control of an Electromagnetically Actuated Soft-Tethered Colonoscope Based on 2OR Pseudo-Rigid-Body Model

Colorectal cancer incidence has been steadily rising worldwide. Magnetic colonoscopes provide new approaches to conduct colon inspection and treatment. This paper presents a novel electromagnetically actuated soft-tethered colonoscope to achieve precise and stable orientation control. An inflated balloon is designed to eliminate the unpredictable disturbance of the floating tether. A 2OR Pseudo-Rigid-Body (PRB) model of the soft tether is developed to analyze the relationship between the tether deflection and applied force and torque. A closed-loop control framework is constructed with visual position feedback. Experiments are first conducted to validate the assumption of the PRB model and the efficacy of the magnetic field model. Then, trajectory tracking tasks and disturbance rejection tests are performed to validate the feasibility of the proposed solution and closed-loop control. Results show that the colonoscope can stably and accurately orient to the desired orientation with an absolute mean position error of less than 0.5 mm and an average velocity of 3.5 mm/s. The distal tip can quickly re-stabilize to the desired orientation even when a large disturbance exists.

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Orientation Control of an Electromagnetically Actuated Soft-Tethered Colonoscope Based on 2OR Pseudo-Rigid-Body Model

Semantic Scholar · Engineering · 2021

Abstract

Colorectal cancer incidence has been steadily rising worldwide. Magnetic colonoscopes provide new approaches to conduct colon inspection and treatment. This paper presents a novel electromagnetically actuated soft-tethered colonoscope to achieve precise and stable orientation control. An inflated balloon is designed to eliminate the unpredictable disturbance of the floating tether. A 2OR Pseudo-Rigid-Body (PRB) model of the soft tether is developed to analyze the relationship between the tether deflection and applied force and torque. A closed-loop control framework is constructed with visual position feedback. Experiments are first conducted to validate the assumption of the PRB model and the efficacy of the magnetic field model. Then, trajectory tracking tasks and disturbance rejection tests are performed to validate the feasibility of the proposed solution and closed-loop control. Results show that the colonoscope can stably and accurately orient to the desired orientation with an absolute mean position error of less than 0.5 mm and an average velocity of 3.5 mm/s. The distal tip can quickly re-stabilize to the desired orientation even when a large disturbance exists.

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