Abstract
Traditional rigid robot application in the medical field is limited due to the limited degrees of freedom caused by their material and structure. Inspired by trunk, tentacles, and snakes, continuum robot (CR) could traverse confined space, manipulate objects in complex environment, and conform to curvilinear paths in space. The continuum robot has broad prospect in surgery due to its high dexterity, which can reach circuitous areas of the body and perform precision surgery. Recently, many efforts have been done by researchers to improve the design and actuation methods of continuum robots. Several continuum robots have been applied in clinic surgical interventions and demonstrated superiorities to conventional rigid-link robots. In this paper, we provide an overview of the current development of continuum robots, including the design principles, actuation methods, application prospect, limitations, and challenge. And we also provide perspective for the future development. We hope that with the development of material science, Engineering ethics, and manufacture technology, new methods can be applied to manufacture continuum robots for specific surgical procedures.
Highlights
Xu et al [50,51,52] proposed the robotic systems of the SJTU Unfoldable Robotic System (SURS) robot for Single Port Laparoscopy (SPL) and endoscopic robotic testbed for Natural Orifice
The ethical issues of medical robots are described from three aspects: safety issues, liability laws, and doctor-patient relationship [114,115,116]
Even the surgical robot is powerful enough to complete medical tasks independently, the robot’s cold personality may not be able to complete the communication with the patient
Summary
With the maturity of robot technology, the application of robots is gradually penetrating from the manufacturing industry to all aspects [1,2]. Traditional rigid robots have shown broad prospect in service industry, real estate industry, agriculture and other aspects. Robots have gradually shown their potential in the medical industry [3]. The rigid robot cannot match the flexibility of the human organs, and it is difficult to access the circuitous parts of the human body. The infinite-degree-freedom (infinite-DOF) robots is called continuum robots (CRs). It was first proposed in the 1960s [6,7]. Because of its flexibility in movement brought by the infinite degrees of freedom, researchers have paid increasing attention to it. Many ideas of bio-inspired CRs have been proposed, and the review of continuum robots applied in the medical field has appeared [7,8]
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