LAUSR

The laryngeal surgery is usually performed with rigid surgical instruments. However, those instruments inevitably cause tissue damage. A novel notch continuum manipulator for laryngeal surgery is proposed. The deformation of the notch continuum manipulator is highly nonlinear. The controller is difficult to construct. The model-based modeling strategy from micro to macro is adopted for forward kinematics. The proposed notch continuum manipulator is modeled as a series of flexible units. Based on the mechanical model and Denavit–Hartenberg method, the mapping from the driven space to the Cartesian space is constructed. The model-free strategy based on the forward kinematics and machine learning is adopted to provide an approximate solution for the inverse kinematics. Therefore, combining the advantages of model-free and model-based strategies, a hybrid method can be proposed to accurately model and solve the kinematics of a class of continuum manipulators. The experimental results obtained through the prototype show that the proposed controller model can meet the actual engineering requirement.