11 accepted papers
Navigating tortuous anatomical pathways, such as the aortic arch, requires continuum robots capable of complex three-dimensional deformations. Existing designs are often limited to specific curve families, and extending their shape capabilities usually increases mechanical complexity and system size
Robot-assisted endovascular navigation provides significant advantages, including reduced radiation exposure for surgeons and improved patient safety. However, a major challenge is to control curvilinear instruments like guidewires precisely for smooth and accurate navigation while adapting to anato
This letter presents MAMMOBOT, one of the first millimetre-scale steerable soft growing robots for medical applications. MAMMOBOT aims to access the breast through the nipple and navigate the mammary ducts to detect precursors of invasive breast cancers. Addressing limitations of the state-of-the-ar
Snake-like robots for endoscopic surgery make it possible to reach deep-seated lesions. With the use of small flexible tendon-driven instruments, it is possible to perform bimanual micro-surgical tasks that are challenging for standard endoscopic surgeries. Existing devices, however, lack articulate…
Snake-like robots are commonly used in Minimally Invasive Surgery as they are able to reach areas deep inside the human body. These robots have instruments that are deployed out of the robot's head and controlled via tendons, which connect the instrument to motors at the proximal end. In most curren…
Over the last few years, there has been a significant rise in designing small, agile and flexible medical systems that can navigate through natural orifices. In the case of endoscopic surgery, existing systems vary significantly from each other which raises the question of the existence of a general…
The real-time teleoperation or telemanipulation of redundant snakelike robots for minimally invasive surgery in a master-slave configuration is a complex problem. There are many possible mappings between a master's standard 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) and a redundant slave robot, typically with n ≫ 6
The use of snake-like robots for surgery is a popular choice for intra-luminal procedures. In practice, the requirements for strength, flexibility and accuracy are difficult to be satisfied simultaneously. This paper presents a computational approach for optimizing the design of a snake-like robot u…
Advances in optical imaging, and probe-based Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy (pCLE) in particular, offer real-time cellular level information for in-vivo tissue characterization. However for large area coverage, the limited field-of-view necessitates the use of a technique known as mosaicking to gener…
Snake like continuum robots are increasingly used for minimally invasive surgery. Most robotic devices of this sort that have been reported to date are controlled in an open loop manner. Using shape sensing to provide closed loop feedback would allow for more accurate control of the robot's position…
The recent evolution of surgical robots has resolved a number of ergonomic issues associated with conventional minimally invasive surgery (MIS) in terms of aligned visiomotor axes, motion scaling and ergonomics. One of the latest advances is the introduction of human-robot cooperative control combin