Abstract
Concentric Tube Robots (CTR) are becoming more and more popular in medical robotics community. In this thesis, a general literature survey on existing works covering the research topics of CTR is first presented. The kinematics of CTR is more specifically detailed since it is the basics of the main contributions of this thesis. The first contribution is a concept study of exploiting CTR for resection of deep brain tumors located at the frontal lobe. Grid searching has been used as the optimization method for the CTR tubes design. This method allows to avoid the crucial problem of weights preselection which is required in all scalarizationmethods existing in literature. Instead, the grid searching method used in this work allows to choose the optimal parameters with the help of graphical illustration of calculation results distribution with respect to the selection criteria. The elastic stability dues to the bending and torsion interaction between tubes is considered and evaluated with a new approach introduced in this work. The second contribution then is to deal with the kinematic uncertainties in motion control of CTR. The proposed control method designed at the actuator level shows that the control design of actuator input with task-space feedback and approximate Jacobian matrix provides robustness in handling inaccuracy in kinematic model and maintains good control performance at the same time.