3D steering of a flexible needle by visual servoing.

This paper presents a robotic control method for 3D steering of a beveled-tip flexible needle. The solution is based on a new duty-cycling control strategy that makes possible to control three degrees of freedom of the needle. A visual servoing control scheme using two orthogonal cameras observing a translucent phantom is then proposed to automatically steer a needle toward a 3D target point. Experimental results show a final positioning error of 0.4 mm and demonstrate the feasibility of this promising approach and its robustness to model errors.