Real Time Estimator to Perform Targeted Biopsies With a Free-Wrist Robot Despite Large Deformations of the Insertion Orifice

In the context of keyhole surgery, and more particularly of uterine biopsy, the fine automatic movements of a surgical instrument held by a robot with 3 active DOF’s require an exact knowledge of the point of rotation of the instrument. However, this center of rotation is not fixed and moves during an examination. This paper deals with a new method of detecting and updating the interaction matrix linking the movements of the robot with the surgical instrument. This is based on the method of updating the Jacobian matrix which is named the “Broyden method”. It is able to take into account body tissue deformations in real time in order to improve the pointing task for automatic movements of a surgical instrument in an unknown environment.

Symmetric and Positive Definite Broyden Update for Unconstrained Optimization

Broyden update is one of the one-rank updates which solves the unconstrained optimization problem but this update does not guarantee the positive definite and the symmetric property of Hessian matrix. In this paper the guarantee of positive definite and symmetric property for the Hessian matrix will be established by updating the vector which represents the difference between the next gradient and the current gradient of the objective function assumed to be twice continuous and differentiable .Numerical results are reported to compare the proposed method with the Broyden method under standard problems.

Strong fluid–solid interactions with segregated CFD solvers

Purpose This paper aims to present a fluid-structure coupling partitioned scheme involving rigid bodies supported by spring-damper systems. This scheme can be used with already existing fluid flow solvers without the need to modify them. Design/methodology/approach The scheme is based on a modified Broyden method. It solves the equations of solid body motion in which the external forces coming from the flow are provided by a segregated flow solver used as a black box. The whole scheme is implicit. Findings The proposed partitioned method is stable even in the ultimate case of very strong fluid–solid interactions involving a massless cylinder oscillating with no structural damping. The overhead associated with the coupling scheme represents an execution time increase by a factor of about 2 to 5, depending on the context. The scheme also has the advantage of being able to incorporate turbulence modeling directly through the flow solver. It has been tested successfully with URANS simulations without wall law, thus involving thin high aspect-ratio cells near the wall. Originality/value Such problems are known to be very difficult to solve and previous studies usually rely on monolithic approaches. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time a partitioned scheme is used to solve fluid–solid interactions involving massless components.