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X-APPLE-TRAVEL-ADVISORY-BEHAVIOR:AUTOMATIC
233791
20260330T082453Z
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260415T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:2
 0260415T120000
URL;TYPE=URI:https://www.wpi.edu/news/calendar/events/robot
 ics-engineering-thesis-presentation-cole-welcher
Robotics Engineering Thesis Presentation - Cole Welcher
Contact-Aware Kinematics for Non-Coaxial Nested Continuum Robots with Arbitrary Play and Cross-Section\n\n\n\n      \n      \n\n\n\nAbstract:
  We propose a physics-based, computationally-efficient method for the forw
 ard and inverse kinematics of continuum robots with nested elements, arbit
 rary cross-sections, inter-element play, and environmental geometries. Thi
 s represents several applications in minimally-invasive medical interventi
 ons, where nested-tube robots are utilized to augment dexterity at the tip
  and where inverse kinematics computation remains challenging due to the c
 omplexity of depicting self-contact and interactions with the anatomy. In 
 our formulation, the slender flexible elements of the robot are described 
 using the Cosserat formulation and their discretized cross-sections as a s
 igned distance field (SDF). The inverse kinematics is computed using the d
 amped Gauss-Newton method, where non-penetration constraints are computed 
 via SDF queries between overlapping cross-sections and are used for residu
 al augmentation of the optimization problem. We perform experimental valid
 ation using a 2-tubes concentric tube robot with Nylon elements. Our exper
 iments in 3D show an average error reduction of 20.68% and a maximum reduc
 tion of 47.15% error, compared to assuming centerline alignment, as previo
 usly proposed. Our method shows an average error of 2.55mm in the absence 
 of environmental constraints and up to 2.76mm when a non-symmetrical tubul
 ar environment is added. The overall computation of the proposed inverse k
 inematics takes less than 0.36s, achieving near real-time computation--fun
 damental in robot control scenarios.\nAdvisor: Professor Giovanni Pittigli
 oCommittee: Professor Loris Fichera, Professor Vincent Aloi\n
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