Percutaneous intervention is among the preferred diagnostic and treatment options in surgery today. Recently, a biologically inspired needle steering system was proposed, where a novel “programmable bevel” is employed to control the tip angle as a function of the offset between interlocked needle segments. The new device, codenamed soft tissue intervention and neurosurgical guide (STING), can steer along arbitrary curvilinear trajectories within a compliant medium, and be controlled by means of an embedded position sensor. In this study, we provide details of our latest attempt to miniaturize the STING, with the design and manufacture of a 4-mm outer diameter (OD) two-part prototype that includes unique features, such as a bespoke trocar and insertion mechanism, which ensure that the segments do not come apart or buckle during the insertion process. It is shown that this prototype can steer around tight bends (down to a radius of curvature of ~70 mm), a performance which is comparable to the best systems in this class. With the need to comply with the specific mechanical constraints of STING, this paper also introduces a novel path planner with obstacle avoidance, which can produce a differentiable trajectory that satisfies constraints on both the maximum curvature of the final trajectory and its derivative. In vitro results in gelatin for the integrated prototype and path planner demonstrate accurate 2-D trajectory following (0.1 mm tracking error, with 0.64 mm standard deviation), with significant scope for future improvements.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers better visualization for diagnosis, interventional radiology, and surgery from other imaging modalities without X-ray exposure. Medical robots have provided solutions for many surgical and rehabilitation procedures. A symbiosis of MRI and robotics can allow manipulation in closed MR-gantry, decrease trauma, operation, and recovery time for patients and improve the dexterity, convenience, and surgical outcome for physicians. However, the inherent properties and limitations of MR scanners had hindered their development. Technological advancements in the field of computers, additive manufacturing, and sensing in the past decade have changed robotics and the focus shifted again toward MRI-compatible robots. This article provides a compendium of the state-of-the-art literature on robotic systems developed for the MRI environment presented between 2009 and 2021. The systematic review discusses surgical and fMRI study robots, the actuation, and sensing solutions developed to assist such robots, recent research emphasis, current limitations, and prospects.

A cable-driven parallel robot has benefits of wide workspace, high payload, and high dynamic response owing to its light cable actuator utilization. For wide workspace applications, in particular, the body frame becomes large to cover the wide workspace that causes robot kinematic errors resulting from geometric uncertainty. However, appropriate sensors as well as inexpensive and easy calibration methods to measure the actual robot kinematic parameters are not currently available. Hence, we present a calibration sensor device and an auto-calibration methodology for the over-constrained cable-driven parallel robots using one-dimension laser distance sensors attached to the robot end-effector, to overcome the robot geometric uncertainty and to implement precise robot control. A novel calibration workflow with five phases—preparation, modeling, measuring, identification, and adjustment—is proposed. The proposed calibration algorithms cover the cable-driven parallel robot kinematics, as well as uncertainty modeling such as cable elongation and pulley kinematics. We performed extensive simulations and experiments to verify the performance of the suggested method using the MINI cable robot. The experimental results show that the kinematic parameters can be identified correctly with 0.92 mm accuracy, and the robot position control accuracy is increased by 58%. Finally, we verified that the developed calibration sensor devices and the calibration methodology are applicable to the massive-size cable-driven parallel robot system.