Openings in the body less than 3mm in diameter do not even need to be sutured closed. What if we could do surgery through openings this small? The patient could go home with just a few band aids!

The major challenge in doing this is that small tools are also flexible tools, and the surgeon cannot push hard enough on tissues to perform all the steps in a typical surgery.

But what if we could connect many small needles to one another inside the body? We could assemble truss-like structures that are much stiffer than any one tool could be on its own.

We do this by using small loops of wire at the tips needle-sized tools. This enables them to “snare” one another, assembling into the desired truss-like structures.

These structures are fascinating from a robotics perspective; they can be reconfigured (loosen the snare and re-grasp at a different point), and they are flexible parallel robots. This puts them right at the intersection of continuum, reconfigurable, and parallel robotics and poses many fascinating design, modeling, parallel robotics, and motion planning problems.

Related Publications:

1. P. L. Anderson, A. Mahoney, and R. J. Webster III. Continuum Reconfigurable Parallel Robots for Surgery: Shape Sensing and State Estimation with Uncertainty. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2(3):1617-1624, 2017.

2. A. W. Mahoney, P. L. Anderson, F. Maldonado, and R. J. Webster III, “More Ports = Less Invasive? A Multi-Needle Robot for Lung Ablation,” In Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics, 2017.

3. A. Kuntz, A. W. Mahoney, N. E. Peckman, P. L. Anderson, R. J. Webster, III, and R. Alterovitz, “Motion Planning for Continuum Reconfigurable Incisionless Surgical Parallel Robots”, in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2017, pp. 6463-6469

4. A. W. Mahoney, P. L. Anderson, P. J. Swaney, F. Maldonado, and R. J. Webster, III, “Reconfigurable Parallel Continuum Robots for Incisionless Surgery”, in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2016, pp. 4330-4336