CAREER: Safe Continuum Robot Inside Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)

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This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports research to create a new class of surgical robots able to reach otherwise inaccessible areas of the body and perform complex procedures with minimal damage to healthy tissue. The two main technical innovations that enable these new capabilities are i) a continuously deformable robot body, monitored using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and ii) shape control and motion planning algorithms that allow precise maneuvering despite imperfect knowledge of the robot and its surroundings. The robot is made from non-magnetic, nested sliding tubes, with the curvature of the tubes controlled by embedded tendons, driven in turn by pneumatic actuators. Challenges in control and planning associated with the highly flexible structure will be met with special miniaturized, MRI-safe, tracking markers embedded in the robot body, in combination with contact-aware, model-based, shape and motion estimation software. The robots resulting from this project will provide enhanced treatment accuracy, efficiency, and safety in a variety of surgical procedures. Related devices could also be used for industrial applications, such as non-destructive inspection of oil pipelines and jet engines. An integrated education plan includes piloting two new courses for the Biomedical Robotics curriculum in the Georgia Tech Biomedical Engineering Department, fostering outreach activities in K-12, undergraduate, graduate, and underrepresented populations, exposing students in under-resourced regions to medical robotics, and disseminating the results of the project through the International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR) held annually at Georgia Tech.Four complementary and interconnected thrusts support the overarching objective of this project, which is to advance the state-of-the-art in continuum surgical robots, including seamless MRI compatibility. The first thrust is to create a novel pneumatically powered, tendon-driven, concentric tube continuum robot with a unified modeling and state estimation framework. The second thrust is actuator-space motor control and task-space robot motion planning to accomplish precise surgical procedures in the presence of uncertainties and disturbances. The third thrust is demonstration and system-level validation of the integrated hardware and software on surgical test tasks with physiologically representative phantoms. The fourth thrust is an integrated research-education infrastructure, to disseminate the results and methods of the project to various groups, with an emphasis on women, minorities, under-represented communities, and veterans.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.