CAREER: Lifesaving Robotic Tentacles

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

Within medical robotics, this research advances telerobotics, and continuum robot architectures, models, sensing, and control, as well as medical science by enabling new diagnostic procedures. Scientific understanding of continuum robots is entering an exciting era where early assumptions implying constant curvature are giving way to more descriptive models of how actuators and external loads combine to produce variable curvatures. Infusing theory from mechanics into robotics science provides a bright path forward. Outside its own field, this also enhances human understanding of biology ? mechanics-based models provide insight on how elephant trunks, octopus tentacles, and other biological continuum structures perform so elegantly. These systems are minimally invasive and are used to combat the most deadly form of cancer (lung), surgically access one of the most difficult to reach locations (the skull base), and increase the impact of one of the most underutilized curative treatments available (cochlear implantation). Within and beyond these first three applications, these less invasive, more accurate, information-guided continuum robots improve public health by reducing patient recovery times, infection rates, and treatment costs, and enabling entirely new surgical approaches to diseases that are untreatable (and in many cases terminal) today. The proposed curriculum infuses research results into the classroom, and involves undergraduates, high school girls, and high school teachers which enhances the research while promoting learning. The tactile haptic device increases the accessibility of engineering to the blind. The testbeds enhance the research infrastructure of the PI?s lab, and the haptic devices enhance the educational infrastructure in universities, in high schools, and in schools for the blind.