Endowed with the expected visions for future surgery, minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has become one of the most rapid developing areas in modern surgery. Soft robotics, which originates from interdisciplinary advances in materials, fabrication, and electronics, featuring better adaptability and safer interaction, holds great promises in addressing current technical challenges in MIS, which are difficult to be solved with current rigid robotic technologies. For the first time, herein, the expected characteristics of next-generation MIS from the surgeons' perspectives are analyzed and the recent progress of soft surgical instruments from three different aspects is comprehensively summarized: engineering design, fabrication techniques, and human-robot interaction. Perspectives of nextgeneration soft surgical robots are then discussed, where some exciting possibilities are emphasized. It is believed that further developments of intelligent soft robotics enable the next-generation MIS to agilely navigate to the target and conduct dexterous diagnostic or therapeutic procedures without any trade-offs in invasiveness and ultimately be a propitious solution for future surgery.
Soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) are extensively investigated due to their simple control strategies for producing sophisticated motions. However, the motions or operations of homogeneous SPAs show obvious limitations in some varying curvature interaction scenarios because of the profile mismatch of homogeneous SPAs and specific interacted objects. Herein, a stiffness preprogrammable soft pneumatic actuator (SPSPA) is proposed by discretely presetting gradient geometrical or materials distributions. Through finite element analysis and experimental validation, a mathematical model of behavior prediction of SPSPA was built to relate the geometrical parameters/materials with its morphing behaviors, making it possible to reversely obtain designed parameters. This design strategy enables conformal and efficient interaction in some curvature varying scenarios. Specifically, higher effective contact area, perimeter utilization ratio, and conformal ability can be obtained while interacting with those inhomogeneous curvature objects, for example, more than 434.7% improvement in contact area rates and 12.5% enhancement in perimeter utilization ratios toward a typical equilateral triangle object. Further, a serial of SPSPAs that have conformal grasping/interactive capability, better contact sensing behaviors were demonstrated. For example, an SPSPA and an SPSP robot were demonstrated, which showed better kinetic, kinematic characterizations and sensing capability compared with the homogeneous one while coming across varying curvature objects. Moreover, underactuated finger rehabilitation SPSPAs were demonstrated with customized profiles and coupled joint motion. This customized scheme can be potentially used in those specific-purposed, single, and repetitive application scenarios where varying curvature, conformal and efficient interaction are needed.
Flexible pressure sensors play an indispensable role in flexible electronics. Microstructures on flexible electrodes have been proven to be effective in improving the sensitivity of pressure sensors. However, it remains a challenge to develop such microstructured flexible electrodes in a convenient way. Inspired by splashed particles from laser processing, herein, a method for customizing microstructured flexible electrodes by femtosecond laser‐activated metal deposition is proposed. It takes advantage of the catalyzing particles scattered during femtosecond laser ablation and is particularly suitable for moldless, maskless, and low‐cost fabrication of microstructured metal layers on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). Robust bonding at the PDMS/Cu interface is evidenced by the scotch tape test and the duration test over 10 000 bending cycles. Benefiting from the firm interface, the developed flexible capacitive pressure sensor with microstructured electrodes presents several conspicuous features, including a sensitivity (0.22 kPa−1) 73 times higher than the one using flat Cu electrodes, ultralow detection limit (<1 Pa), rapid response/recovery time (4.2/5.3 ms), and excellent stability. Moreover, the proposed method, inheriting the merits of laser direct writing, is capable of fabricating a pressure sensor array in a maskless manner for spatial pressure mapping.
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