STIFF-FLOP

All project partners were invited to the STIFF-FLOP workshop organised by the University of Siegen (USIEGEN). The workshop was held 21th – 25th October 2013 in Siegen, Germany. The opportunity of meeting all project partners was used to arrange a scientific and technical management meeting.

Read more: Workshop on vision and integration

The EAES invited the STIFF-FLOP Project Coordinator Prof. Kaspar Althoefer to give a keynote speech at their 2013 International Congress. 

Prof. Althoefer was talking about “Flexible Robot Manipulators for MIS: Initial Developments and Considerations” . After being one 18 months into the STIFF-FLOP project, the latest developments were presented to the European endoscopic surgeons. Hence, Prof. Althoefer emphasized on the benefits of the flexible and soft STIFF-FLOP manipulator to the traditional rigid laparoscopic and robotic keyhole surgery. STIFF-FLOP’s novelties such as the intelligent control and learning as well as the sensing system were part of his lecture.

Cecilia Laschi and Matteo Cianchetti from SSSA demonstrated how the OCTOPUS robot works and explained how it could one day be used for tasks such as repairing underwater structures like oil pipelines and ships’ hulls to performing search-and-rescue operations – venturing into places too dangerous for humans! The event was held at the Science Museum in London.(October 31, 2012)
The STIFF-FLOP project is inspired by the octopus and SSSA is a partner within the new EU FP7 project led by Professor Kaspar Althoefer, King’s College London.

Stiff Flop dealt with several candidate technologies for the development of an actuating arm to be used in minimally invasive surgery. The technologies under investigation ranged from smart materials such as shape memory alloys, as well as pneumatic and hydraulic driven hyper-elastic silicone. Prototypes were fabricated and tested with primary interest of the use of pneumatically actuated soft silicone.

Read more: Materials

The current work in WP4 is focused on the real-time controller design of the single module. The system involves three controllers that work at different levels:

– Low level: Pressure control with close loop

– Middle level: Coarsely controlling the bending/shape with a kinematic open loop

– High level: Finely controlling the bending/shape with Model Predictive Control (MPC)

Read more: Real-time control

The STIFF-FLOP consortium held a technical meeting at SSSA in Pisa in order to review the progress of the project.

During this two-day event, each partner presented their research and opened discussions between biologists, surgeons and engineers to move the project towards a successful first year. This face-to-face meeting also gave the possibility to visit the labs and to provide an insight into on-going projects at SSSA including the OCTOPUS project.

Over 15 applicants for the PhD stipend and over 45 academic researchers were interested in working for STIFF-FLOP at the Centre for Robotics Research, Department of Informatics, King’s College London during the coming 3 years.

Read more: Recruitment of 2 RAs and 1 PhD student

The Centre for Robotics Research launched a new website in October 2012. Next to Prof. Kaspar Althoefer, Prof. Lakmal Seneviratne, Dr Thrishantha Nanayakkara and Dr Hongbin Liu, CoRe members also include Prof. Jian Dai, Dr H.-K. Lam, and Dr Michael Spratling and their research teams. STIFF-FLOP is one of the featured EU projects on the new CoRe website.