An Origami-Based Medical Support System to Mitigate Flexible Shaft Buckling

Abstract

This paper presents the development of an origami-inspired support system (the OriGuide) that enables the insertion of flexible instruments using medical robots. Varying parameters of a triangulated cylindrical origami pattern were combined to create an effective highly compressible anti-buckling system that maintains a constant inner diameter for supporting an instrument and a constant outer diameter throughout actuation. The proposed origami pattern is composed of two repeated patterns: a bistable pattern to create support points to mitigate flexible shaft buckling and a monostable pattern to enable axial extension and compression of the support system. The origami-based portion of the device is combined with two rigid mounts for interfacing with the medical robot. The origami-based portion of the device is fabricated from a single sheet of polyethylene terephthalate. The length, outer diameter, and inner diameter that emerge from the fold pattern can be customized to accommodate various robot designs and flexible instrument geometries without increasing the part count. The support system also adds protection to the instrument from external contamination.

Current Development on Origami/Kirigami‐Inspired Structure of Creased Patterns toward Robotics

“…As the Kresling pattern changes the length of cylindrical structures rapidly when it is subjected to radial torsional load, [ 95,96 ] these patterns have been regarded as an origami spring and are widely used in the design of stretchable mechanisms, [ 97,98 ] e.g., robotic arms and worm‐like crawling robotics. [ 27,36,99 ] Origami springs have innumerable types, but the structure and driving mode are similar (Figure 4C–E). For instance, Ren et al presented a caterpillar‐inspired biomimetic origami robot prototype originated from triangular spring models (Figure 4F).…”

Toward the Design of Kresling Tower Origami As a Compliant Building Block

“…In [17], the origami is used for its deployment capabilities, with the panels used to deploy an antenna. In [8] the Kresling tower is also used for the motion of its panels, the inner radius of the tower being used to guide an endoscope. In [12], the tower is used for its kinematics as the helical motion is used to transform a rotational motion into a translation motion to achieve peristaltic locomotion.…”

“…To use the Kresling tower as a component in a mechanism, link between the pattern geometry and other characteristics of the tower kinematics is needed. In [8], it is shown the value of the inner radius of the structure, later named r i , with the index i used to designate this inner dimension (Fig. 3), is to be evaluated.…”

“…To our knowledge, there is no existing model giving analytical expressions of these properties for configurations outside the stable states. In the literature [12,8,20], these characteristics are indeed only computed for stable configurations. Our approach is then to derive such a model to access to these characteristics, with explicit relationships between their values and the parameters that define the origami pattern.…”

A Computational Design Synthesis Method for the Generation of Rigid Origami Crease Patterns

“…Together, these categories constitute the entire spectrum of origamibased design [9,10], which finds applications in mathematics [11], material science [12][13][14][15], DNA [16] and biomedical research [17][18][19][20][21], mechanical engineering [22], robotics [23][24][25][26], consumer goods [27], architecture [28], and space [29][30][31].…”