Estimating Tip Contact Forces for Concentric Tube Continuum Robots Based on Backbone Deflection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Concentric Tube Continuum Robots are among the smallest and most flexible instruments in development for minimally invasive surgery, thereby enabling operations in areas within the human body that are difficult to reach. Unfortunately, integrating state-of-the-art force sensors is challenging for these robots due to their small form factor, although contact forces are essential information in surgical procedures. In this work, we propose a novel data-driven approach based on Deep Direct Cascade Learning (DDCL) to create a virtual sensor for computing the tip contact force of Concentric Tube Continuum Robots. By exploiting the robot’s backbone’s inherent elasticity, deflection is used to estimate the respective external tip contact force. We evaluate our approach on different data representations for a single tube and apply it subsequently on a three-segment Concentric Tube Continuum Robot. Furthermore, we devise a novel transfer learning approach through DDCL to improve the estimation accuracy by pre-training a cascaded network with simulated data. Subsequently, we fine-tune the network based on a small real-world data set recorded from the physical robot.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".