A Novel Design of Water-Activated Variable Stiffness Endoscopic Manipulator with Safe Thermal Insulation

In natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (NOTES), an ideal endoscope platform should be flexible and dexterous enough to go through the natural orifices to access the lesion site inside the human body, and meanwhile provide sufficient rigidity to serve as a base for the end-effectors to operate during the surgical tasks. However, the conventional endoscope has limited ability for maintaining high rigidity over the length of the body. This paper presents a novel design of a variable stiffness endoscopic manipulator. By using a new bioplastic named FORMcard, whose stiffness can be thermally adjusted, water at different temperatures is employed to switch the manipulator between rigid mode and flexible mode. A biocompatible microencapsulated phase change material (MEPCM) with latent heat storage properties is adopted as the thermal insulation for better safety. Experiments are conducted to test the concept design, and the validated advantages of our proposed variable stiffness endoscopic manipulator include: shorter mode activation time (25 s), significantly improved stiffness in rigid mode (547.9–926.3 N·cm2) and larger stiffness-adjusting ratio (23.9–25.1 times).

Modeling and motion compensation of a bidirectional tendon-sheath actuated system for robotic endoscopic surgery

Recent study shows that tendon-sheath system (TSS) has great potential in the development of surgical robots for endoscopic surgery. It is able to deliver adequate power in a light-weight and compact package. And the flexibility and compliance of the tendon-sheath system make it capable of adapting to the long and winding path in the flexible endoscope. However, the main difficulties in precise control of such system fall on the nonlinearities of the system behavior and absence of necessary sensory feedback at the surgical end-effectors. Since accurate position control of the tool is a prerequisite for efficacy, safety and intuitive user-experience in robotic surgery, in this paper we propose a system modeling approach for motion compensation. Based on a bidirectional actuated system using two separate tendon-sheaths, motion transmission is firstly characterized. Two types of positional errors due to system backlash and environment loading are defined and modeled. Then a model-based feedforward compensation method is proposed for open-loop control, giving the system abilities to adjust according to changes in the transmission route configuration without any information feedback from the distal end. A dedicated experimental platform emulating a bidirectional TSS robotic system for endoscopic surgery is built for testing. Proposed positional errors are identified and verified. The performance of the proposed motion compensation is evaluated by trajectory tracking under different environment loading conditions. And the results demonstrate that accurate position control can be achieved even if the transmission route configuration is updated.

Haptic feedback and control of a flexible surgical endoscopic robot

A flexible endoscope could reach the potential surgical site via a single small incision on the patient or even through natural orifices, making it a very promising platform for surgical procedures. However, endoscopic surgery has strict spatial constraints on both tool-channel size and surgical site volume. It is therefore very challenging to deploy and control dexterous robotic instruments to conduct surgical procedures endoscopically. Pioneering endoscopic surgical robots have already been introduced, but the performance is limited by the flexible neck of the robot that passes through the endoscope tool channel. In this article we present a series of new developments to improve the performance of the robot: a force transmission model to address flexibility, elongation study for precise position control, and tissue property modeling for haptic feedback. Validation experiment results are presented for each sector. An integrated control architecture of the robot system is given in the end.

HAPTIC MODELING OF STOMACH FOR REAL-TIME PROPERTY AND FORCE ESTIMATION

Robotic devices are being employed in gastrointestinal endoscopy procedures for diagnostics and surgery. However, force measurement, a very important factor for control and haptic feedback, becomes very challenging due to the strict size limitation of such devices and the flexible nature of the endoscope. This paper focuses on the modeling of the interior stomach wall for tool–tissue interactions from two perspectives: (1) If the interaction force between the robotic tool and the tissue can be measured, we utilize the force information to estimate the mechanical property of the stomach wall in real-time; given the force and position information, we would derive mathematically the only system model that can guarantee identifiability under arbitrary manipulation; (2) in the worst case scenario where force measurement is not available, we propose a viscoelastic model to restore force information solely based on position and motion information available from the robot. Ex-vivo experiments were performed on porcine stomach specimens to demonstrate the performance of the proposed models. Based on these findings, generalization and implementations of the modeling in real-time applications were discussed.

Modeling tendon-sheath mechanism with flexible configurations for robot control

Surgical and search/rescue robots often work in environments with very strict spatial constraints. The tendon-sheath mechanism is a promising candidate for driving such systems, allowing power sources and actuation motors placed outside to transmit force and energy to the robot at the distal end through the constrained environment. Having both compactness and high force capability makes it very attractive for manipulation devices. On the other hand, the friction attenuation of tendon tension is nonlinear and configuration-dependent due to tendon/sheath interactions throughout the transmission path. This is a major obstacle for the tendon-sheath mechanism to be widely adopted. Here, we focus on the friction analysis for flexible and time-varying tendon-sheath configurations: the most challenging but yet commonly encountered case for real-world applications. Existing results on fixed-path configurations are reviewed, revisited, and extended to flexible and time-varying cases. The effect of tendon length to friction attenuation is modeled. While focusing on tension transmission, tendon elongation is also discussed with the length effect applied. In the end, two-dimensional results are extended to three-dimensional tendon-sheath configurations. All propositions and theorems are validated on a dedicated experimental platform.