STIFF-FLOP surgical manipulator: Mechanical design and experimental characterization of the single module
By Matteo Cianchetti, Tommaso Ranzani, G. Gerboni, I. D. Falco, Cecilia Laschi, Arianna Menciassi. 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2013
295 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper presents the concept design, the fabrication and the experimental characterization of a unit of a modular manipulator for minimal access surgery. Traditional surgical manipulators are usually based on metallic steerable needles, tendon driven mechanisms or articulated motorized links. In this work the main idea is to combine flexible fluidic actuators enabling omnidirectional bending and elongation capability and the granular jamming phenomenon to implement a selective stiffness changing. The proposed manipulator is based on a series of identical modules, each one consisting of a silicone tube with pneumatic chambers for allowing 3D motion and one central channel for the implementation of the granular jamming phenomenon for stiffening. The silicone is covered by a novel bellows-shaped braided structure maximizing the bending still limiting lateral expansion. In this paper one single module is tested in terms of bending range, elongation capability, generated forces and stiffness changing.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Control and Systems Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/83dbf76852a515d7ebef0d3f5b1bb8e69c6ed2f8
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Biomedical Engineering
In Control and Systems Engineering
In Mechanical Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Stiffening in Soft Robotics: A Review of the State of the Art (2016, methodology): “(c) A CAD drawing of the overall architecture of the STIFF-FLOP manipulator, with the design of the single module showing all the structural elements (soft-bodied module with fluidic and the stiffening chambers), adapted from [40].”