Combining Tube Design and Simple Kinematic Strategy for Follow-the-Leader Deployment of Concentric Tube Robots

Abstract

Concentric tube robots show promising performances for many medical applications. A particularly useful but challenging deployment of these robots, called “follow-the-leader” deployment, consists in the robot following the path traced out by its tip. In this paper, we propose to combine a simple and analytical kinematic approach combined with now possible tube design to offer efficient follow-the-leader behavior. The approach is presented and then assessed with promising performances using a realistic scenario in the context of human nose exploration.