Identification of Workspace of the Soft-Magnet Based Position Tracking System for Medical Robots Using Parallel Experiments

Abstract

This paper proposes a method of identifying the effective workspace of the soft-magnet based position tracking system for medical robots, within which the position measurement error is bounded. A digital twin of the position tracking system is built using analytical magnetic modeling. Parallel virtual experiments of position tracking are performed to obtain empirical position measurement errors. Then the relationship between position error and magnetic sensitivity can be found out. Based on this relationship, given some desired position error bound, the effective workspace can be efficiently identified by thresholding the magnetic sensitivity, which can be analytically computed. Once the dependence of position error on magnetic sensitivity is accurately determined, simulation results show that the proposed method can be generalized to effectively identify the workspace of such soft-magnet based position tracking systems with different configurations of sensors, avoiding running any extra cumbersome experiment or simulation.