A Preliminary Study on 3D Tracking of an Untethered Microrobot

Thanks to recent advances in medical robotics, various traditional surgical procedures have been started to be carried out by the help of robot manipulators. Robot assisted techniques have increased efficiency of minimally invasive surgery methodologies such as endoscopic surgery and success in these tethered approaches have helped rapid spread of robot assisted methodologies in current related literature. On the other hand, advantages of these minimally invasive catheter based techniques vanish as the target area becomes smaller, narrower and critical to interfere within a limited workspace via tethered tools. In order to solve these aforementioned limitations, studies of untethered microrobotics in medicine have started to increase. In this study, a mean of tracking a microrobot within a blackbox environment is developed. Microrobot tracking is performed by applying machine learning methodology on hall effect data collected from an array of hall effect sensors and position data collected from a commercial optical tracking system. Predictions of developed microrobot tracking method are investigated.