Adaptive Dynamic Control for Magnetically Actuated Medical Robots

In the present letter, we discuss a novel dynamic control approach for magnetically actuated robots, by proposing an adaptive control technique, robust toward parametric uncertainties and unknown bounded disturbances. The former generally arise due to partial knowledge of the robots' dynamic parameters, such as inertial factors, the latter are the outcome of unpredictable interaction with unstructured environments. In order to show the application of the proposed approach, we consider controlling the magnetic flexible endoscope (MFE), which is composed of a soft-tethered internal permanent magnet (IPM), actuated with a single external permanent magnet. We provide with experimental analysis to show the possibility of levitating the MFE-one of the most difficult tasks with this platform-in case of partial knowledge of the IPM's dynamics and no knowledge of the tether's behavior. Experiments in an acrylic tube show a reduction of contact of the 32% compared to non-levitating techniques and 1.75 times faster task completion with respect to previously proposed levitating techniques. More realistic experiments, performed in a colon phantom, show that levitating the capsule achieves faster and smoother exploration and that the minimum time for completing the task is attained by the proposed approach.