STIFF-FLOP

Octopuses and robots will lead to new ways for surgeons to safely and effectively intervene in cancers, prostate and heart conditions.

The Centre for Robotics Research at King’s College London leads a consortium of European scientists and medical doctors aiming to create soft, flexible robotic tools to improve “keyhole” or minimally invasive surgery (MIS). King’s roboticists and clinicians at Guy’s and St Thomas Hospitals will work with European partners to research and create robotic technology that will enable doctors to carry out a far greater range of minimally invasive surgical procedures than previously possible, advancing interventions on cancer, prostate and the heart. The project has received €7.35 million funding from the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme following a highly-competitive selection process. .

Read more: €7.35 million funding to develop for first flexible robotic instruments

We would like to

• Use biological inspiration to create novel, flexible manipulator structures that are inherently capable of morphing their state from completely soft to entirely articulated,
• Create novel control strategies based on biological inspiration taken from octopus,
• Embed distributed sensing (tactile as well as position) to enable cognitive development and intelligent control in a highly redundant manipulation device,
• Advance learning and cognitive reasoning in a complete embodiment of a hyper-redundant manipulation system that experiences and learns from physical interactions with its environment,
• Provide a practical solution to the important areas of minimally invasive surgery with great commercial potential and impact,
• Bring together a multi-disciplinary team of scientific experts from engineering, biologists and medicine to progress a novel manipulation concept from an initial idea to a testable prototype.

Read more: Aims

In-line with Challenge-2 – Cognitive systems and robotics, this STIFF-FLOP aims to find clearer answers to a series of questions such as how low level motor control programs deal with the dilemma of exposing the brain to the stochastic phenomena in the natural world as they are vs. controlling the stiffness of the body to iron out much of the unwanted complexity in the physical world, whether such interactions lead to the synthesis of task specific associations or more generic physical laws of nature, what are the functional characteristics of primitive substrates of cognition that help to build either of the above associations, how various primitives gathered in different uncertain contexts are organized in long term memory, and how they interact among each other to orchestrate higher order cognition, etc. Developing a variable stiffness robotic system poses many design challenges in cognitive robotics,
novel mechanism design, manipulation and grasping in an uncertain environment, bio-inspired design and control, machine learning, and cognitive development through physical interactions.

Read more: Motivation