Colloquia

Summary

The Flux One system of Flux Robotics will help surgeons during vascular operations, for example

during (F)EVAR interventions. It can assist with navigating guidewires inside the blood vessels

and shorten the time needed to reach fenestrations. Before entering the operating room, it

must be determined that the robotic end-effector can traverse specific trajectories. The system

has a robotic arm with 7 degrees of freedom; this is useful for obstacle avoidance and having

a bigger workspace. A potential downside is that path planning becomes challenging because

there are infinite solutions for each end-effector pose. The limiting factors for solutions are the

joint limits and obstacles. The following framework is made to achieve the goal of finding a

smooth, safe, and accurate path. The open-source software MoveIt 2 is a robotic manipulation

platform used with ROS 2 and is the main structure in the framework. Moveit 2 couples different

other software packages, such as path planners, obstacle avoidance, and inverse kinematics. The

general optimizing path planner is a rapidly-exploring random tree variant from OMPL. To get

a consistent path, the resulting path is re-planned in the robot’s nullspace so that joint position

changes between following poses are small while a path from start to goal state is achieved. The

robot’s null space is planned in 2D using a probabilistic roadmap method from OMPL. The

result is checked in a Gazebo simulation environment, and the surgeons can use it to visualize

what the arm will do and whether that is feasible within the context of surgery.