14 accepted papers
Nowadays, gastrointestinal cancer has widely impacted people's health worldwide due to its high mortality rate. Early treatment of gastrointestinal cancer by endoscopic procedure can greatly increase survival rates of patients. Nevertheless, current flexible endoscopic instruments lack of degree of
Endoscopic robot has garnered significant attention for its ability to offer auxiliary traction and precise maneuverability. However, the low stiffness of its insertion tube makes it susceptible to deformation, which poses great challenges for precise control. Existing variable stiffness technologie
Increased demand for minimally invasive surgery has accelerated the adoption of natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery. Meanwhile, the increasing complexity of endoscopic procedures has raised the demand for endoscopist competence. In this paper, we present a novel endoscopic system to perf
In natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery, instruments such as endoscopes can be flexibly advanced into the human colon or stomach via tortuous natural orifices. However, the insertion of endoscope causes great discomfort to the patient, resulting in vomiting, bleeding and even perforation.
This letter presents a lockable upper-limb exoskeleton to reduce the physical fatigue of laborers/surgeons operating with upper limbs maintaining fixed posture for long time. A novel structure design integrating the jamming and engagement mechanisms that can provide locking of flexion and adduction
The adoption of variable stiffness actuators allows robots to take advantages of both rigid and soft structures. Jamming based variable stiffness structures are receiving increased attentions due to advantages of light weight, easy fabrication, and so on. However, the maximum bending stiffness and s
To achieve more dexterous surgical operations, development of robots with more degrees of freedom (DOFs) is becoming one of the main trends for surgical robot research. However, manipulation complexity is therefore increased and it is difficult for surgeons to control all the DOFs with two hands alo
In wearable applications, traditional pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) cannot fully satisfy the requirements of safe and sufficient interaction with the human body. The requirements include high contraction ratio, self-contained sensing, reconfiguration, locking abilities, and avoidance of the sq
In industrial production, current pipe-climbing robots can replace humans in real-time monitoring, leak inspection, and other tasks. However, most pipe-climbing robots are designed for specific applications with complex structures; this limits the adaptability to various conditions. To solve this is
This study proposes a novel artificial muscle based on a pouch-type actuator with a contraction ratio amplification mechanism (CRAM). The CRAM places the final length of the pouch-type actuator into a secondary direction, while the main direction is used only for contraction purpose. Thus, the contr
Due to the limited field of view (FOV), the probe-based confocal laser endomicroscopy (pCLE) imaging system remains challenging to be widely used in clinic. Existing video mosaicking approaches are usually troubled by poor real-time capability and sensitivity to tissue deformations and intensity flu…
Probe-based confocal laser endomicroscopy (pCLE) is a vital technology to realize <i>in-vivo</i> imaging of the organ surface in real-time. However, the field of view (FOV) of pCLE is too small to get a full picture of targeted tissues for diagnosing. It is recognized that collecting the image strea
In recent years, robotic technology has been introduced to medical fields, and many surgical robots have been proposed for minimally invasive surgery (MIS). However, due to the limitations in dexterity imposed by surgical instruments and occlusion area, surgeons experience great difficulties during
Confocal endomicroscopy can be used for identification of early mucosal dysplasia in various gastrointestinal conditions, and has particular potential in the monitoring of Barrett's oesophagus and the early stages of oesophageal cancer. However, it can be difficult to systematically scan a significa…