Gripe-Needle: A Sticky Suction Cup Gripper Equipped Needle for Targeted Therapeutics Delivery

Frontiers in Robotics and AI

Lyndon da Cruz¹  Christos Bergeles²  Kieran Joymungul²  S.M.Hadi Sadati²  Zisos Mitros³ 

[1] NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, London, United Kingdom;School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom;Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences, University College London, London, United Kingdom;

关键词: suction cup gripper;    steerable catheters/needles;    medical robots;    bioinspiration;    concentric tube robot;   

DOI  :  10.3389/frobt.2021.752290

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

This paper presents a multi-purpose gripping and incision tool-set to reduce the number of required manipulators for targeted therapeutics delivery in Minimally Invasive Surgery. We have recently proposed the use of multi-arm Concentric Tube Robots (CTR) consisting of an incision, a camera, and a gripper manipulator for deep orbital interventions, with a focus on Optic Nerve Sheath Fenestration (ONSF). The proposed prototype in this research, called Gripe-Needle, is a needle equipped with a sticky suction cup gripper capable of performing both gripping of target tissue and incision tasks in the optic nerve area by exploiting the multi-tube arrangement of a CTR for actuation of the different tool-set units. As a result, there will be no need for an independent gripper arm for an incision task. The CTR innermost tube is equipped with a needle, providing the pathway for drug delivery, and the immediate outer tube is attached to the suction cup, providing the suction pathway. Based on experiments on various materials, we observed that adding a sticky surface with bio-inspired grooves to a normal suction cup gripper has many advantages such as, 1) enhanced adhesion through material stickiness and by air-tightening the contact surface, 2) maintained adhesion despite internal pressure variations, e.g. due to the needle motion, and 3) sliding resistance. Simple Finite Element and theoretical modeling frameworks are proposed, based on which a miniature tool-set is designed to achieve the required gripping forces during ONSF. The final designs were successfully tested for accessing the optic nerve of a realistic eye phantom in a skull eye orbit, robust gripping and incision on units of a plastic bubble wrap sample, and manipulating different tissue types of porcine eye samples.

【 授权许可】

Unknown