Interactive Motion Planning for Concentric Tube Robots

Concentric tube robots may enable new, safer minimally invasive surgical procedures by taking curved paths to difficult-to-reach areas of a patient’s anatomy. Operating these devices is hard due to their complex and unintuitive kinematics. Existing position control methods for driving the robot’s tip can cause the robot to collide with sensitive structures in the anatomy associated with patient injury, and prior motion planning methods that offer collision avoidance are too slow for a surgeon to interactively control the robot during a procedure. In this paper, we present a motion planning method that can compute collision-free motion plans for concentric tube robots at interactive rates. Our planner’s high speed enables surgeons to continuously and freely drive the robot’s tip while the planner ensures that the robot’s shaft does not collide with any anatomical obstacles. Our method achieves its high speed and accuracy by combining offline precomputation of a collisionfree roadmap with online position control. We demonstrate our interactive planner in a simulated neurosurgical scenario where a user guides the robot’s tip through the environment while the robot automatically avoids collisions with the anatomical obstacles.