Learning-based intelligent trajectory planning for auto navigation of magnetic robots

Introduction: Electromagnetically controlled small-scale robots show great potential in precise diagnosis, targeted delivery, and minimally invasive surgery. The automatic navigation of such robots could reduce human intervention, as well as the risk and difficulty of surgery. However, it is challenging to build a precise kinematics model for automatic robotic control because the controlling process is affected by various delays and complex environments. Method: Here, we propose a learning-based intelligent trajectory planning strategy for automatic navigation of magnetic robots without kinematics modeling. The Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network is employed to establish a global mapping relationship between the current sequence in the electromagnetic actuation system and the trajectory coordinates. Result: We manually control the robot to move on a curved path 50 times to form the training database to train the LSTM network. The trained LSTM network is validated to output the current sequence for automatically controlling the magnetic robot to move on the same curved path and the tortuous and branched new paths in simulated vascular tracks. Discussion: The proposed trajectory planning strategy is expected to impact the clinical applications of robots.