Surgical Applications of Compliant Mechanisms:A Review

Current surgical devices are mostly rigid and are made of stiff materials, even though their predominant use is on soft and wet tissues. With the emergence of compliant mechanisms (CMs), surgical tools can be designed to be flexible and made using soft materials. CMs offer many advantages such as monolithic fabrication, high precision, no wear, no friction, and no need for lubrication. It is therefore beneficial to consolidate the developments in this field and point to challenges ahead. With this objective, in this article, we review the application of CMs to surgical interventions. The scope of the review covers five aspects that are important in the development of surgical devices: (i) conceptual design and synthesis, (ii) analysis, (iii) materials, (iv) maim facturing, and (v) actuation. Furthermore, the surgical applications of CMs are assessed by classification into five major groups, namely, (i) grasping and cutting, (ii) reachability and steerability, (iii) transmission, (iv) sensing, and (v) implants and deployable devices. The scope and prospects of surgical devices using CMs are also discussed

Optically Sensorized Tendons for Articulate Robotic Needles

This study proposes an optically sensorized tendon composed of a 195 µm diameter, high strength, polarization maintaining (PM) fiber Bragg gratings (FBG) optical fiber which resolves the cross-sensitivity issue of conventional FBGs. The bare fiber tendon is locally reinforced with a 250 µm diameter Kevlar bundle enhancing the level of force transmission and enabling high curvature tendon routing. The performance of the sensorized tendons is explored in terms of strength (higher than 13N for the bare PM-FBG fiber tendon, up to 40N for the Kevlar-reinforced tendon under tensile loading), strain sensitivity (0.127 percent strain per newton for the bare PM-FBG fiber tendon, 0.04 percent strain per newton for the Kevlar-reinforced tendon), temperature stability, and friction-independent sensing behavior. Subsequently, the tendon is instrumented within an 18 Ga articulate NiTi cannula and evaluated under static and dynamic loading conditions, and within phantoms of varying stiffness for tissue-stiffness estimation. The results from this series of experiments serve to validate the effectiveness of the proposed tendon as a bi-modal sensing and actuation component for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgical instruments

Multi Degree of Freedom Hinge Joints Embedded on Tubes for Miniature Steerable Medical Devices

With the proliferation of successful minimally invasive surgical techniques, comes the challenge of shrinking the size of surgical instruments further to facilitate use in applications such as neurosurgery, pediatric surgery, and needle procedures. The present thesis introduces laser machined, multi-degree-of-freedom (DoF) hinge joints embedded on tubes, as a possible means to realize such miniature instruments without the need for any assembly. A method to design such a joint for an estimated range of motion is explored by using geometric principles. A geometric model is developed to characterize the joint and relate it to the laser machining parameters, design parameters, and the workpiece parameters. The extent of interference between the moving parts of the joint can be used to predict the range of motion of the joint for rigid tubes and for future design optimization. The total usable workspace is estimated using kinematic principles for joints in series and for two sets of orthogonal joints. The predicted range of motion was compared to the measured values for fabricated samples of different hinge sizes and kerf dimensions, and it was shown that the predicted values are close to the measured ranges across samples. The embedded hinge joints described in this thesis could be used for micro-robotic applications and minimally invasive surgical devices for neurosurgery and pediatric surgery. Our work can open up avenues to a new class of miniature robotic medical devices with hinge joints and a usable channel for drug delivery

Tendon-Driven Notched Needle for Robot-Assisted Prostate Interventions

M.S

Advances in Robot Kinematics : Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Advances in Robot Kinematics

International audienceThe motion of mechanisms, kinematics, is one of the most fundamental aspect of robot design, analysis and control but is also relevant to other scientific domains such as biome- chanics, molecular biology, . . . . The series of books on Advances in Robot Kinematics (ARK) report the latest achievement in this field. ARK has a long history as the first book was published in 1991 and since then new issues have been published every 2 years. Each book is the follow-up of a single-track symposium in which the participants exchange their results and opinions in a meeting that bring together the best of world’s researchers and scientists together with young students. Since 1992 the ARK symposia have come under the patronage of the International Federation for the Promotion of Machine Science-IFToMM.This book is the 13th in the series and is the result of peer-review process intended to select the newest and most original achievements in this field. For the first time the articles of this symposium will be published in a green open-access archive to favor free dissemination of the results. However the book will also be o↵ered as a on-demand printed book.The papers proposed in this book show that robot kinematics is an exciting domain with an immense number of research challenges that go well beyond the field of robotics.The last symposium related with this book was organized by the French National Re- search Institute in Computer Science and Control Theory (INRIA) in Grasse, France