Alignment Motion Control for an Automated Human Ear Surgery via Vision‐Servoing

Abstract

To treat a worldwide common ear disease called Otitis Media with Effusion, a robotic device allowing fast and automatic grommet tube insertion has been designed in our earlier works. However, the previous version has to be manually placed close to the tympanic membrane before the insertion procedures. For the purpose of realizing a fully automated surgical process, locating and realizing a suitable insertion path from outside the ear forms a crucial step. It is then desirable to control the working channel to be aligned to the axial direction of auditory canal from the vision channel. In this paper, a fast and robust vision‐based servomechanism is proposed to achieve the planar alignment. To detect and track the region of auditory canal through the image sequences, an image segmentation algorithm based on the phase information and combining with the hough transformation technique is proposed. With the help of Kalman filter, a new look‐and‐move servomechanism can be achieved by utilizing the visual and motion measurements simultaneously, resulting in an effective and robust servoing performance.

Safety-Enhanced Model-Free Visual Servoing for Continuum Tubular Robots Through Singularity Avoidance in Confined Environments

“…Direct vision-based methods, however, are the most advantageous approaches because less modification of the hardware is required, while accurate and reliable visual feedback is not compromised. Using image-based sensing techniques, measurements obtained from the visual feedback signals as the input to the robot control loop so that a visual servoing system can be constructed [18]- [20]. In addition, visual servoing is recognized to be an effective tool for physiological motion compensation [21], [22].…”