Journal
IEEE ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION LETTERS
Volume 2, Issue 3, Pages 1579-1585Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2017.2676240
Keywords
Mechanism design; medical robots and systems; surgical robotics: steerable catheters/needles
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health [R01 EB018849]
- National Science Foundation
- NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF BIOMEDICAL IMAGING AND BIOENGINEERING [R01EB018849] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
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Flexible medical robots can improve surgical procedures by decreasing invasiveness and increasing accessibility within the body. Using preoperative images, these robots can be designed to optimize a procedure for a particular patient. To minimize invasiveness and maximize biocompatibility, the actuation units of flexible medical robots should be placed fully outside the patient's body. In this letter, we present a novel, compact, lightweight, modular actuation, and control system for driving a class of these flexible robots, known as concentric tube robots. A key feature of the design is the use of three-dimensional printed waffle gears to enable compact control of two degrees of freedom within each module. We measure the precision and accuracy of a single actuation module and demonstrate the ability of an integrated set of three actuation modules to control six degrees of freedom. The integrated system drives a three-tube concentric tube robot to reach a final tip position that is on average less than 2 mm from a given target. In addition, we show a handheld manifestation of the device and present its potential applications.
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