The planning of continuum robots is generally based on the patient’s anatomy using pre-operative images. However, their practical deployment can be challenging. Open-loop approaches are prone to errors due to modeling accuracy or physiological motions of the patient during the procedure, and human-in-the-loop approaches require specific skills from the surgeon. To overcome those limits, we propose an automatic tip-steering approach for concentric tube robots based on visual SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping).
