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| Professor Michael Yip, principal investigator for the grant. Photo by David Baillot |
Electrical and mechanical engineers at UC San Diego received
a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop flexible snake-like
robots outfitted with smart skin and embedded actuators for use in medical
procedures. These robots will enable safer and more efficient
endoscopic and intravascular procedures for a wide range of ailments, from cardiovascular
disease to cancer.
Flexible, invertebrate-like robots capable of twisting
through the tiny, curvy spaces of the human anatomy are called continuum robots. While versions of these machines exist for
surgical applications today, it is difficult for doctors to know where exactly
they are in the body during a procedure because the robots can be up to four
feet long and lack sensors to detect their position. Furthermore, surgical
robots that are currently FDA-approved lack the dexterity and flexibility
needed to access spaces deep within the body. This makes it often impossible to
localize, reach, and treat diseases, reducing the advantages the precision
robotics provide to surgery.
To address these challenges, the researchers plan to create
robots that leverage machine learning to teach themselves how to access
challenging anatomy, while increasing their physical dexterity by embedding new
technologies for actuation and sensing. They plan to develop a thin skin
embedded with arrays of antennas, capable of tasks like wirelessly tracking the
robot’s position in the human body, making it easier for doctors and surgeons
to manipulate it when and where needed.
“Our goal is to develop safe, robotic surgical systems that
not only augment what doctors can do, but create new procedures they would have
never been able to perform by hand,” said Michael Yip, a professor of
electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego and principle investigator
for the grant. “That is the advantage that continuum robots bring – they are an
extension of the surgeon’s hands that can reach and perform surgical tasks that
otherwise would be impossible to do”.
The researchers also plan to develop new modeling, control
and validation platforms to overcome challenges for sensing,
testing, and reproducibility in flexible medical robots. Their modeling
platform would consider the robot and the human tissue environment as a tightly
coupled and controllable system, instead of two distinct entities.
Since there are currently no off-the-shelf hardware
solutions for either the robot or biologically relevant testing environments,
there are no standardized performance metrics for comparison and validation
across this field. This has made it difficult for researchers and industry to
objectively determine how much progress is being made with new developments in
surgical robotic platforms. The team aims to create these validation metrics,
which will have a significant impact on the medical robotics research community
by driving down barriers to robotics research and development as well as offering
templates and common validation strategies to improve the communication,
interpretation, and reproducibility of new research in the field.
