Minimally invasive surgery improves patient recovery time, minimizes surgical complications, and leaves smaller incisions on the patient skin. Yet drawbacks prevent the complete adoption of these methods, including the lack of sensor feedback which can lead to unintended tissue damage during surgery. Soft robots have been developed to minimize damage compared to rigid counterparts, yet control techniques can become complicated and computationally taxing due to the flexibility of polymeric materials and hyper-redundancy in the system. Additionally, sensor integration in soft systems at a miniature scale and sensor feedback for closed-loop control remains challenging.
Presented in this thesis is a millimeter-scale continuum robot created from monolithically fabricated, origami-inspired, fluidically actuated programmable composite actuator modules with embedded ionic resistive self-sensing. The modules consist of inflatable Teflon bellows surrounded by a rigid arm structure with flexible joints. Constraints in the rigid structure mechanically program different types of motion---translation, bending, and rototranslation. An ionic resistive sensing mode is embedded, using biocompatible working fluid at low voltage for position tracking. Modules are stacked in series to form a continuum robot and a model is developed and analyzed using sensor data to track tip position, with the reduced number of degrees of freedom in the system allowing for ease of modeling using robot joint kinematics. / 2025-05-24T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/46252 |
| Date | 24 May 2023 |
| Creators | Elder, Nash |
| Contributors | Russo, Sheila |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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