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Biologically inspired probabilistic models

octopus movement

Biological inspiration within the STIFF-FLOP robot aims at learning from the octopus strategies to control the highly redundant arm. Motions such as reaching for food can be used to test the representation capability of the developed model, which could then be re-used to encode other types of skills within the surgical environment.

The Console – Design Concept And First Tele-Test

Console

FRK’s concept of a control console is based on a user-interface to control the position of the end effector of the STIFF-FLOP robot arm and a system of feedback information regarding the position and forces created during robot tool-environment interaction; preparing new ground in haptics, operator worn sleeves are integrated with pneumatic or vibrating actuators to relay collisions between the robot arm and the environment to the surgeon.

News from the University of Surrey

Stiff-flop module

The STIFF-FLOP consortium successfully demonstrated the integration of the large-scale system using two flexible modules and validated its performance in real-time for an ex-vivo tissue ablation case study. The two optimised STIFF-FLOP modules are integrated with position and force sensors.

Control model for the STIFF-FLOP arm

simulator image

The motions capacities and reachable positions of the STIFF-FLOP arm are clearly depending on the bending capacities of the flexible modules and on the number of flexible and controllable modules embedded within the STIFF-FLOP arm. Adding more flexible modules can be considered as a mean of increasing the reachable space by the arm. Nevertheless the addition of modules is not the only solution for doing so.

2:1 scaled phantom models in frontal plane

Image of phantom models

FRK created a novel phantom model based on the anatomical shape of the human abdomen – a new feature is that the abdominal surface is made from PET (Politereftalan etylen) with different thickness and different numbers of layers adapted to optimally emulate the mechanical properties of the abdominal area of a patient.

Stiff-Flop data fusion system

Structure of data fusion model

PIAP advanced methods for sensor fusion over the last year. Since soft manipulators have no rigid links, the modelling of their shape is not trivial. Soft manipulators can bend at any point, twist and elongate as well. External forces can act at any point of the arm and its deformation is distributed not only at discrete points. The above causes the previously used shape calculating algorithms to be insufficient and, because of that, new methods had to be developed.

Inflatable robot at King’s CoRe

Image of inflatable Robot

King’s CoRe has explored a new hybrid actuation principle combining pneumatic and tendon-driven actuators for a soft robotic manipulator. The fusion of these two actuation principles leads to an overall antagonistic actuation mechanism whereby pneumatic actuation opposes tendon actuation – a mechanism commonly found in animals where muscles can oppose each other to vary joint stiffness.

New design approach

Image of new design approach

The Industrial Research Institute for Automation and Measurements (PIAP) has designed, developed and tested a novel actuation solution for the Stiff-Flop project. The previous design relying on external braiding to limit the chamber expansion caused a lot of issues with regards to position sensing as well as actuation.