Stiffness Adaptation of a Hybrid Soft Surgical Robot for Improved Safety in Interventional Surgery.

Minimally invasive instruments are inserted per-cutaneously and are steered toward the desired anatomy. The low stiffness of instruments is an advantage; however, once the target is reached, the instrument usually is required to transmit force to the environment. The main limitation of the constant stiffness is predetermined maneuverability and cap of force transmission. Whereas, a highly flexible device can be safely steered through the body but is not suitable for payload limit, while a highly stiff device can have relatively high loads but cannot be steered in highly tortuous trajectories. To overcome this limitation, an adaptive stiffness soft robot was proposed, and the effects of the chamber pressure on the stiffness of the soft robot were investigated. To this end, a single-chamber pneumatic soft robot with one tendon was designed and fabricated. Afterward, a continuum mechanics model based on the nonlinear Cosserat rod model with hyperelastic material model and large deformation kinematics of the robot was developed. The shooting method solved the model as a boundary value problem with Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. The results of the model showed stiffness adaptation feasibility with simultaneous tendon-driving and pneumatic actuation. Thus, to validate the theoretical findings, a series of experimental studies were performed with pressure in the range of 33 to 44 kPa and tendon tensions in the range of 0 to 2.7 N. The theoretical and experimental results for tip displacement and stiffness showed similar trends with a maximum error of 8.25%.