A Heart Stabilization Device Exploiting Gyroscopic Actuation: Design and Control

The heart motion is the main hindrance to the development of recent less invasive surgical techniques in the cardiac field. The problem can be partially solved by maintaining the intervention area with stabilizers but the remaining displacements are still important. We propose a device able to exert a torque on the stabilizer in order to compensate for heart action in real time. The system is based on gyroscopic actuation associated with acceleration sensing which allows to free from grounding constraints. In this paper we present first the system architecture and its mechanical model. We describe afterward the prototype design and the experimental setup. Then we detail the control strategy which includes a Kalman filter dedicated to the observation of both the state and the disturbance signals. Several control laws are compared based on disturbance compensation and static feedforward, taking into account gyroscopic actuation specificities. Finally these controls are tested in simulation on a more detailed model.