Space-Time Localization and Registration on the Beating Heart.

This paper presents a framework for localizing a miniature epicardial crawling robot, HeartLander, on the beating heart using only 6-degree-of-freedom position measurements from an electromagnetic position tracker and a dynamic surface model of the heart. Using only this information, motion and observation models of the system are developed such that a particle filter can accurately estimate not only the location of the robot on the surface of the heart, but also the pose of the heart in the world coordinate frame as well as the current physiological phase of the heart. The presented framework is then demonstrated in simulation on a dynamic 3-D model of the human heart and a robot motion model which accurately mimics the behavior of the HeartLander robot.

Towards localizing on the surface of the beating heart.

This paper presents preliminary work toward localizing on a surface which undergoes periodic deformation, as an aspect of research on HeartLander, a miniature epicardial crawling robot. Using only position measurements from the robot, the aim of this work is to use the nonuniform movements of the heart as features to aid in localization. Using a particle filter, with motion and observation models which accurately model the robotic system, registration and localization parameters can be quickly and accurately identified. The presented framework is demonstrated in simulation on dynamic 2-D models which approximate the deformation of the surface of the heart.