Robotic Needle Insertion Into Viscoelastic Tissue

Many modern clinical practices involve percutaneous needle insertion. Today, medical robotics may offer methods for improving such practices. This paper develops a controller to ensure that a needle tip tracks a trajectory beginning in a non-contact position and ending within viscoelastic tissue. Through employment of a sliding mode controller and a neural network (NN), the controller guarantees semi-global asymptotic tracking of the desired trajectory. A Lyapunov-based stability analysis and a simulation are provided.