8 accepted papers
This paper presents a soft Cable-Driven Parallel Robot for gastrointestinal surgery. The robot consists of an inflatable scaffold and a hydraulic variable stiffness end-effector and features six degrees of freedom. Experiments involving passage through a colon model, knot tying, and retraction have
Minimally Invasive Surgery has advanced surgical practice, yet early-stage gastrointestinal cancer treatment remains challenging. Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection offers a solution but faces maneuverability constraints in complex anatomical environments. This paper presents a novel inflatable soft r
This paper presents a soft, inflatable, cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) for Minimally Invasive Surgery. The CDPR has 5 degrees of freedom and is driven by 6 cables and 6 hydraulic folded actuators. The actuator utilizes a folded chamber to pull a cable. The robot comprises a soft hexagonal variab
This paper presents a novel pneumatic pouch sensor, designed to mount on a colonoscope, that can effectively estimate the contact forces with the environment. The pouch sensor was designed to maximize the sensing range, and it was fabricated using a 2D laser welding technique from our track record.…
In Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS), the estimation of the pose of surgical tools is crucial for applications such as surgical navigation, visual servoing, autonomous robotic task execution and augmented reality. A plethora of hardware-based and vision-based methods have been propose…
In this article, we investigate the model based position control of soft hydraulic actuators arranged in an an-tagonistic pair. A dynamical model of the system is constructed by employing the port-Hamiltonian formulation. A control algorithm is designed with an energy shaping approach, which account…
Incorrectly sized balloon catheters can lead to increased post-surgical complications, yet even with preoperative imaging, correct selection remains a challenge. With limited feedback during surgery, it is difficult to verify correct deployment. We propose the use of integrated impedance measurement…
Soft robotic systems offer benefits over traditional rigid systems through reduced contact trauma with soft tissues and by enabling access through tortuous paths in minimally invasive surgery. However, the inherent deformability of soft robots places both a greater onus on accurate modelling of thei…