Tinghua Zhang, Sishen YUAN et al. for “PneumaOCT: Pneumatic optical coherence tomography endoscopy for targeted distortion-free imaging in tortuous and narrow internal lumens”, a collaboration between CUHK ABI Lab (https://lnkd.in/gUuzQqDt) and RENLab (labren.org),
published in Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adp3145).
“ETSM: Automating Dissection Trajectory Suggestion and Confidence Map-Based Safety Margin Prediction for Robot-assisted Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection”, accepted at #ICRA2025 (arXiv preprint: arXiv:2411.18884).
๐ Congratulations to our brilliant team members on these well-deserved recognitions!
Additionally, Prof. Hongliang Ren delivered an insightful talk, “Endoscopic Multisensory Navigation with Soft Flexible Robotics”, highlighting the latest advancements in endoscopic navigation and soft medical robotics.
๐ก Soft pneumatic actuators are at the heart of soft robotics, offering reliability, safety, and flexibility. However, conventional bulky air compressors and pipes have limited their integration and lightweight design. Enter the Peltier pouch motor (PPM), a cutting-edge soft thermoelectric-based actuator that redefines possibilities in the field.
๐ The PPM introduces modular and dual-stroke capabilities through active phase transition of a low-boiling-point liquid, enabling pipeless thermo-pneumatic actuation. Its lightweight and stretchable design fosters hyper-modularity, paving the way for diverse degrees-of-freedom hybrid systems.
๐ From thermo-responsive land locomotion to submersible noise-free hovering and beyond, the PPM excels in various applications, including smart curtains control, body-temperature-driven wrist rehabilitation, and adaptive hybrid gripping. Our results showcase exceptional performance metrics, highlighting high load rates (around 400%), remarkable heat transfer efficiency (heating boost 425%, cooling boost 138%), and rapid thermal response (heating 0.57ยฐโsโ1, cooling 0.29ยฐโsโ1 at 4.5โV).
The paper is available at https://lnkd.in/gfS5fGSw
The research is the result of a remarkable collaboration between Yang Yang from CUHK and ZJU, Sam, Jiewen Lai from CUHK, Chaochao Xu from NUS, Zhiguo He and Pengcheng Jiao from ZJU, and Hongliang Ren from CUHK and NUS.
๐ Open the below article for more details!!!
There has been a growing need for soft robots operating various force-sensitive tasks due to their environmental adaptability, satisfactory controllability, and nonlinear mobility unique from rigid robots. It is of desire to further study the system instability and strongly nonlinear interaction phenomenon that are the main influence factors to the actuations of lightweight soft actuators.
Here, we present a design principle on lightweight pneumatically elastic backbone structure(PEBS) with the modular construction for soft actuators, which contains a backbone printed as one piece and a common strip balloon. We build a prototype of a lightweight (<80 g) soft actuator, which can perform bending motions with satisfactory output forces (~ 20 times self-weight).
Experiments are conducted on the bending effects generated by interactions between the hyper-elastic inner balloon and the elastic backbone. We investigated the nonlinear interaction and system instability experimentally, numerically and parametrically. To overcome them, we further derived a theoretical nonlinear model and a numerical model. Satisfactory agreements are obtained between the numerical, theoretical and experimental results. The accuracy of the numerical model is fully validated. Parametric studies are conducted on the backbone geometry and stiffness, balloon stiffness, thickness, and diameter. The accurate controllability, operation safety, modularization ability, and collaborative ability of the PEBS are validated by designing PEBS into a soft laryngoscope, a modularized PEBS library for a robotic arm, and a PEBS system that can operate remote surgery. The reported work provides a further applicability potential of soft robotics studies.
FIG. 1. Illustrative demonstration of the PEBS: (a) the detailed structure and dimensions of the PEBS, (b) the design principle that can be divided into the separation stage and the interaction stage, and (c) the design principle that can be specifically divided into the separation stage, the insufficient interaction stage, the full interaction stage, and the excessive interaction stage, based on the interaction conditions.
FIG. 2. Nonlinear interaction phenomenon analyses: (a) the free oscillation phenomenon of the backbone structure generated by the structural asymmetric stress responses to gravity, (b) the interaction performances of the backbone structure and the density plot showing the relationship between the gap numbers, pressures, and bending angles, (c) the interaction performances of the balloon and the relationships between the pressures and expansion ratios regarding the radial and axial expansion ratios, respectively, (d) relationships between the pressures and stresses regarding the backbone structure and balloon, respectively.
FIG. 3. Applications of PEBS demonstrate unique advantages of accurate controllability, operation safety, modularization ability, and collaborative ability. (a) A PEBS soft laryngoscope that can operate laryngeal diagnosis. (b) Real-time images captured by the integrated image sensor. (c) Modularized PEBS library that can be installed onto a robot arm. (d) A PEBS grasper that can operate various grasping tasks. (e) The PEBS system can be potentially applied to operate a debridement.
Developing a multi-functional magnetic-driven soft robot to carry out various medical missions remains challenging. In this work, we design a tripedal soft magnetic robot with three radial magnetized cylindric permanent magnets embedded in three soles. The motion modalities for movement include butterfly crawling (along the x and y axis), scorpion crawling, and rolling. At different frequencies, the robot exhibits different behaviors in terms of speed and trajectory under different moving modalities. The maximum velocity of the butterfly crawling and scorpion crawling motion at the frequency of 1 Hz is measured to be 5.30 mm/s and 9.06 mm/s.
For details, please check the paper at https://lnkd.in/gfbRzNYu
