Position control of concentric-tube continuum robots using a modified Jacobian-based approach

Concentric-tube robots can offer dexterous positioning even in a small constrained environment. This technology turns out to be beneficial in many classes of minimally invasive procedures. However, one of the barriers to the practical use of a concentric-tube robot is the design of a real-time control scheme. In previous work by the authors, a computationally efficient torsionally compliant kinematic model of a concentric-tube robot was developed. Using this computationally fast technique and deriving the robot's Jacobian, a new position control approach is proposed in this paper. This mechanism provides computational efficiency as well as good tracking accuracy. To evaluate the performance, experiments were conducted, and the results obtained demonstrate the feasibility of enabling the robot's tip to perform trajectory tracking in real time.