7. Conclusion and outlook

This article covers the literature on Concentric Tube Robots (CTRs) and discusses advances in their main areas of research. Existing work to date in modeling with different considerations of the physical phenomena involved (bending and torsion) has been developed. In addition, a relatively exhaustive overview of work on the design of RTC actuation units and the optimization of tube dimensions and shapes was presented. In addition, advances in trajectory planning and control applied to RTCs were detailed. In addition, an overview of the various medical applications currently being validated was presented, demonstrating the enormous potential of RTCs. Finally, functional prototypes developed by the two French research teams dealing with this subject were presented, with experimental validation of different approaches.

The improvements to be made to RTCs mainly concern...