Robotic systems have become increasingly sophisticated over the past decades, improving both in terms of precision and capabilities. This is gradually facilitating the partial automation of some surgical and medical procedures.
Researchers at Tsinghua University have recently developed a soft robotic tentacle that could potentially be used to improve the efficiency of some standard medical procedures. This tentacle, introduced in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, is controlled through their novel control algorithm, together with the so-called active cooling for shape memory alloy, the actuating candidate for the robot.
“A neurosurgeon doctor one day came to our lab and asked about the possibility of developing a soft, controllable catheter for him to assist him in his neurosurgeries,” Huichan Zhao, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “He would like this soft catheter to be extremely safe to the surroundings and be able to bend to different directions by a remote controller. Starting from these requirements, we developed a soft robotic tentacle.”
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