Abstract
Soft actuators are the components responsible for organs and tissues adsorptive fixation in some surgical operations, but the lack of shape sensing and monitoring of a soft actuator greatly limits their application potential. Consequently, this paper proposes a real-time 3D shape reconstruction method of soft surgical actuator which has an embedded optical fiber with two Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors. First, the design principle and the sensing of the soft actuator based on FBG sensors are analyzed, and the fabrication process of soft actuator which has an embedded optical fiber with two FBG sensors is described. Next, the calibration of the FBG sensors is conducted. Based on curvatures and curve fitting functions, the strategy of 3D shapes reconstruction of the soft actuator is presented. Finally, some bending experiments of the soft actuator are carried out, and the 3D shapes of the soft actuator at different bending states are reconstructed. This well reconstructed 3D shape of a soft actuator demonstrates the effectiveness of the shape reconstruction method that is proposed in this paper, as well as the potential and increased applications of these structures for real soft surgical actuators.
Highlights
In recent years, soft actuators are widely used to implement surgical tasks due to its large-scale deformation and compliant adaptation to meet the complex elastic structures of the human organs and tissues [1,2,3]
While current researchers have emphasized the promising potential of soft manipulators in surgical applications, the lack of complicate shape measurement and monitoring for soft actuator are greatly limiting their practical application
We describe our procedure for molding the soft actuator The design of the Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG)-based optical fiber is embedded into the soft actuator through a polyimide tape, which acted as the strain limited
Summary
Soft actuators are widely used to implement surgical tasks due to its large-scale deformation and compliant adaptation to meet the complex elastic structures of the human organs and tissues [1,2,3]. The optical fiber sensor is harmless when in contact with human tissues and organs [12,13,14,15], and the optical fiber sensor can be embedded into the flexible body of the soft manipulator to realize its morphological sensing These distinctive characteristics of the optical fiber sensor make it more advantageous, and the prospects for soft surgical robotics and biomedical applications; and several types of research of optical fiber sensors have been investigated in recent years. As proposed in [13], the bending state of a manipulator was measured by an optical fiber sensing system and the mechanism of this sensing system based on a laser power modulation This sensing system has good accuracy in measuring bending angles, bending radius and orientation of the flexible segment, its 3D shape reconstruction and visualization monitoring are not realized.
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