Stimuli-responsive cylindrical hydrogels mimic intestinal peristalsis to propel a solid object.

The emerging field of soft robotics relies on soft, stimuli-responsive materials to enable load transport, manipulation, and mobility in complex unconstrained environments. These materials often need to replicate biological functionality such as muscle contractions and flexibility. Here we demonstrate a soft actuator prototype based on thermosensitive PNIPAAM hydrogels that can transport and manipulate objects.

Multiphoton crosslinking for biocompatible 3D printing of type I collagen.

Multiphoton fabrication is a powerful technique for three-dimensional (3D) printing of structures at the microscale. Many polymers and proteins have been successfully structured and patterned using this method. Type I collagen comprises a large part of the extracellular matrix for most tissue types and is a widely used cellular scaffold material for tissue engineering.

Determining the threshold of time-delay for teleoperation accuracy and efficiency in relation to telesurgery.

Background: Advances in robotics have made teleoperated surgical procedures a feasible means of treating patients in remote locations. In this study a suite of experiments was performed to investigate the influence of time-delay on teleoperation accuracy and efficiency during a path-following task.

Materials And Methods: Subjects used a Phantom Omni 6-degrees of freedom (dof) input device (Sensable, Triangle Park, NC) to move the end-effector of a Mitsubishi (Tokyo, Japan) PA-10 7-dof robotic manipulator along a prescribed path.

Support vector machines improve the accuracy of evaluation for the performance of laparoscopic training tasks.

Background: Despite technological advances in the tracking of surgical motions, automatic evaluation of laparoscopic skills remains remote. A new method is proposed that combines multiple discrete motion analysis metrics. This new method is compared with previously proposed metric combination methods and shown to provide greater ability for classifying novice and expert surgeons.