Sayahkarajy, M.; Witte, H.; Faudzi, A.A.M. Chorda Dorsalis System as a Paragon for Soft Medical Robots to Design Echocardiography Probes with a New SOM-Based Steering Control. Biomimetics2024, 9, 199.
Sayahkarajy, M.; Witte, H.; Faudzi, A.A.M. Chorda Dorsalis System as a Paragon for Soft Medical Robots to Design Echocardiography Probes with a New SOM-Based Steering Control. Biomimetics 2024, 9, 199.
Sayahkarajy, M.; Witte, H.; Faudzi, A.A.M. Chorda Dorsalis System as a Paragon for Soft Medical Robots to Design Echocardiography Probes with a New SOM-Based Steering Control. Biomimetics2024, 9, 199.
Sayahkarajy, M.; Witte, H.; Faudzi, A.A.M. Chorda Dorsalis System as a Paragon for Soft Medical Robots to Design Echocardiography Probes with a New SOM-Based Steering Control. Biomimetics 2024, 9, 199.
Abstract
Continuum robots play the role of end-effector in various surgical robots and endoscopic devices. The robots may be categorized as rigid or soft continuum robots (SCRs). While the SCRs have proven advantages such as safety and compliance, more research and development are required to enhance their capability for specific medical scenarios. This research aims at designing a soft robot considering concepts of geometric and kinematic similarities. The chosen application is a semi-invasive medical application known as Transesophageal Echocardiography (TEE), but the methodology can be implemented in other similar applications. Since established rigid carrier construction make use of principles we find as well embodied in vertebral spines, the paragon for soft robot solution can be the phylogenetic precursor of the spine, the Chorda dorsalis. The feasibility of fabrication of a soft endoscopic device derived from that paragon within a robotics laboratory was shown empirically by producing a three-segment pneumatic SCR. The kinematic model was proposed based on the method of transformation matrices, and an algorithm based on a self-organizing map (SOM) was proposed and applied to realize kinematic similarity. The simulation results indicate that the algorithm acting as an open-loop controller forces the soft robot tip to follow the desired path which in this case is the path of the rigid probe. It is concluded that the solution provides a soft robot that can surrogate and succeed the traditional rigid counterpart owing to size, workspace, and kinematics.
Keywords
soft mechanisms; biomimetic development; medical device; automation of transesophageal echocardiography; TEE
Subject
Engineering, Bioengineering
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
