Orthogonal Pulse-Width-Modulation for Combined Electromagnetic Actuation and Localization
Denis von Arx, Bradley J. Nelson, Quentin Boehler
Abstract
Electromagnetic Navigation Systems can be used to remotely guide medical devices such as magnetic catheters or guidewires, holding potential in a variety of minimally invasive surgical applications. This paper introduces a method to simultaneously actuate and localize a tethered magnetic device with embedded sensor pickup coils using a single system. Six-degree-of-freedom localization is achieved by driving the electromagnets of the Electromagnetic Navigation System with mutually orthogonal pulse-width-modulated voltages of different frequencies. The method is demonstrated using a human-scale system composed of three electromagnets to actuate and localize a magnetic catheter prototype with pickup coils embedded at its tip. In this case, the pose is estimated at a rate of 77 Hz, with a typical mean accuracy below 2 mm in position and 2<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^\circ$</tex-math></inline-formula> in orientation.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ral2025_orthogonalpulsew,
title = {Orthogonal Pulse-Width-Modulation for Combined Electromagnetic Actuation and Localization},
author = {Denis von Arx and Bradley J. Nelson and Quentin Boehler},
booktitle = {RA-L 2025},
year = {2025}
}