A Biomimetic steering robot for Minimally invasive surgery application

Abstract

Minimally Invasive Surgery represents the future of many types of medical interventions such as keyhole neurosurgey or transluminal endoscopic surgery. These procedures involve insertion of surgical instruments such as needles and endoscopes into human body through small incision/ body cavity for biopsy and drug delivery. However, nearly all surgical instruments for these procedures are inserted manually and there is a long learning curve for surgeons to use them properly. Many research efforts have been made to design active instruments (endoscope, needles) to improve this procedure during last decades. New robot mechanisms have been designed and used to improve the dexterity of current endoscope. Usually these robots are flexible and can pass the constrained space for fine manipulations. In recent years, a continuum robotic mechanism has been investigated and designed for medical surgery. Those robots are characterized by the fact that their mechanical components do not have rigid links and discrete joints in contrast with traditional robot manipulators. The design of these robots is inspired by movements of animals' parts such as tongues, elephant trunks and tentacles. The unusual compliance and redundant degrees of freedom of these robots provide strong potential to achieve delicate tasks successfully even in cluttered and unstructured environments. This chapter will present a complete application of a continuum robot for Minimally Invasive Surgery of colonoscopy. This system is composed of a micro-robotic tip, a set of position sensors and a real-time control system for guiding the exploration of colon. Details will be described on the modeling of the used pneumatic actuators, the design of the mechanical component, the kinematic model analysis and the control strategy for automatically guiding the progression of the device inside the human colon. Experimental results will be presented to check the performances of the whole system within a transparent tube.

Energy-shaping control of soft continuum manipulators with in-plane disturbances

“…Since its invention, multiple other FMA designs have been proposed and developed (e.g. Abe et al, 2007; Chen et al, 2009; Cianchetti et al, 2014; Garriga-Casanovas et al, 2018; Marchese and Rus, 2016; McMahan et al, 2006; Mosadegh et al, 2014; Wehner et al, 2016), as well as torsional soft actuators (Sanan et al, 2014). Despite all this progress on design and manufacturing of FMAs and soft continuum manipulators in general, the study of model-based control strategies specific to these systems remains a largely unexplored field (Thuruthel et al, 2018).…”

Toward a Common Framework for the Design of Soft Robotic Manipulators with Fluidic Actuation

“…One of the pioneering is the flexible microactuator (FMA), 14 , 15 which introduced a design layout that has been subsequently adapted and further investigated by various groups. 16–19 Another concept that uses three parallel PAMs to achieve bending was incorporated in the segments of the OctArm robot. 20 , 21 More recently, bending devices with alternative layouts have been proposed, including PneuNets, 22 miniature actuators, 23 , 24 fingers in a hand, 25 and bending devices directly applied for the development of manipulators.…”

Kinematics of Continuum Robots With Constant Curvature Bending and Extension Capabilities

“…Interestingly, the end-effector orientation is the concatenation of the rotations associated with the robot sections, as expressed in Eq. (9). The rotation associated with a robot section with a given bending and extension can also be achieved with zero extension and a different, specific bending of the section.…”

“…Since it was first proposed [7], a myriad of robots with designs inspired by it have been developed, e.g., see Refs. [8][9][10][11][12]. However, the development of soft, continuum robots is not limited to FMA-type devices.…”