A Novel Handheld Bronchoscope Robot With Human–Robot Shared Control Strategy for Pulmonary Examination

Bronchoscope robots have been developed for the early diagnosis of lung diseases. Although they have made some progress in sophisticated design, most still have cumbersome back-end driving systems, adopting electric sliders or mechanical arms to achieve feed motion, and the device cost is also high. Besides, current global navigation strategies also rely on expensive sensors, and these factors limit the popularization of bronchoscope robots in underdeveloped areas. In this article, a low-cost, lightweight, and portable handheld bronchoscope robot is presented. The structural design and kinematics model of the robot are introduced in detail. In addition, a human–robot shared control strategy is proposed, which combines human intervention commands with segmented endoscopic images by the U-net model to achieve safe bronchoscopy. The experimental results show that the robot has good steering ability and flexible maneuvering capability and can go deep into the fifth and higher generation of the bronchus for examination. In addition, bronchoscopy experiments demonstrate that the proposed handheld bronchoscope robot with a human–robot shared control strategy can achieve a better operation level of bronchoscopy than the teleoperation method.