Thesis: Semi-autonomous Arm-body Control of Flexible Steerable Intraluminal Robots in Complex Surgical Procedures

Flexible steerable intraluminal robots have been developed to navigate, inspect and perform complex surgical procedures inside the patient's digestive system, reducing the high incidence and mortality rate of colorectal cancer. Flexible steerable intraluminal robots are typically composed of two arms at the tip of the body, forming a coupled kinematic architecture with up to 10 degrees of freedom. This thesis focuses on the development of robotic assistance to handle the challenges (the coupled architecture and the high number of degrees of freedom) of flexible steerable intraluminal robots in complex surgical environments, reducing the risk of incorrectly performing complex surgical procedures, such as the dissection stage of endoscopic submucosal dissection and the colonoscopy and biopsy case. The surgical tasks are modeled and formulated as objectives and constraints in an optimization-based control framework based on the task-function approach. A validation study with 10 subjects for the dissection case shows a better performance of the surgical task at a time penalty, in comparison with the manual mode in a simulated environment. In the colonoscopy and biopsy case, results show that for a realistic colon model, the surgical task can be performed automatically by coordinated control in a benchtop experiment. Future work should perform in-depth validation of the proposed control approaches for preclinical and clinical transfer.