This work describes the concept design, fabrication and experimental characterization of a novel soft robotic manipulator and discuss the feasibility of his utilization as a tool for grasping procedures in Minimally Invasive Surgery.
In particular it has been fabricated by casting silicone in molds, and with a cable-driven actuator mechanism.
The idea of this proposal is to study the feasibility to grip soft tissues by using soft instruments. The advantage are all related to the compliant intrinsically property of the elastomeric materials and exploiting it in a surgery tool would mean to be able to safely getting closer to soft tissues inside the unstructured workspace of abdominal cavity, without the risk of damaging blood vessels or organs during the manipulating procedures. This is equivalent to not worry too much about the control, simplifying the system without any sensors for the feedback, and only by exploiting the tension of the cables as element for real-time monitoring of deformation and pressure at the finger front-side. This assertion will be described and supported in the fourth chapters of this work by explaining the development of a mechanical model and experimental testing procedures to correlate the deformation and force exerted at the finger front-side with the tension of the cables.
As an introduction, in the first chapter an overview of the areas in which the work fits into will be done, in the second and in the third the concept design and fabrication process will be explained, in the fourth and fifth the experimental validation of the prototype will be described and the results with relative discuss will be listed. Finally in the sixth chapter, conclusions and future work will be drawn.
This work has been carried on at the Biorobotic Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna and at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Zurich
