Design and Synchronous Control of a Magnetically-Actuated and Ultrasound-Guided Multi-Arm Robotic System

This paper presents the design of a new multi-arm robotic system with mobile magnetic actuation and extracorporeal ultrasound guidance dedicated to magnetic catheterization. The kinematic model of the external mobile actuation arm (EMAA) and extracorporeal ultrasound-integrated tracking arm (EUTA) are derived based on Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) parameters, including specially designed end-effectors. The synchronous control scheme for the mobile magnet and mobile ultrasound probe is introduced with polar coordinate-based magnetic actuation and visual servo-based ultrasound tracking method. Meanwhile, a denoising algorithm based on Speckle Reduction Anisotropic Diffusion (SRAD) is implemented. The effectiveness of the proposed robotic system has been verified by conducting several experimental studies, e.g., ex-vivo tests of catheter steering in endovascular phantom and soft tissue-imitating phantom with the average error of 0.32 mm and signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) of 12.2 for the ultrasound imaging.