CAREER: Lifesaving Robotic Tentacles

在医疗机器人领域，本研究通过启用新的诊断程序，推动了远程机器人技术、连续体机器人架构、模型、传感和控制以及医学科学的发展。对连续体机器人的科学理解正在进入一个激动人心的时代，在这个时代，早期暗示恒定曲率的假设正在让位于关于执行器和外部负载如何结合产生可变曲率的更具描述性的模型。将力学理论注入机器人科学提供了一条光明的前进道路。在自己的领域之外，这也增强了人类对生物学的理解。基于力学的模型提供了对象鼻、章鱼触手和其他生物连续体结构如何表现得如此优雅的见解。这些系统是微创的，用于对抗最致命的癌症（肺癌），手术进入最难到达的位置之一（颅底），并增加最未充分利用的治疗方法之一（耳蜗植入）的影响。在前三种应用之外，这些侵入性更小、更精确、信息引导的连续机器人通过减少病人的恢复时间、感染率和治疗成本来改善公众健康，并为当今无法治愈的疾病（在许多情况下是绝症）提供全新的手术方法。建议的课程将研究成果融入课堂，并涉及本科生，高中女生和高中教师，在促进学习的同时加强研究。这种触觉装置增加了工程对盲人的可及性。试验台增强了PI的研究基础设施。这些触觉设备改善了大学、高中和盲人学校的教育基础设施。

Within medical robotics, this research advances telerobotics, and continuum robot architectures, models, sensing, and control, as well as medical science by enabling new diagnostic procedures. Scientific understanding of continuum robots is entering an exciting era where early assumptions implying constant curvature are giving way to more descriptive models of how actuators and external loads combine to produce variable curvatures. Infusing theory from mechanics into robotics science provides a bright path forward. Outside its own field, this also enhances human understanding of biology ? mechanics-based models provide insight on how elephant trunks, octopus tentacles, and other biological continuum structures perform so elegantly.These systems are minimally invasive and are used to combat the most deadly form of cancer (lung), surgically access one of the most difficult to reach locations (the skull base), and increase the impact of one of the most underutilized curative treatments available (cochlear implantation). Within and beyond these first three applications, these less invasive, more accurate, information-guided continuum robots improve public health by reducing patient recovery times, infection rates, and treatment costs, and enabling entirely new surgical approaches to diseases that are untreatable (and in many cases terminal) today. The proposed curriculum infuses research results into the classroom, and involves undergraduates, high school girls, and high school teachers which enhances the research while promoting learning. The tactile haptic device increases the accessibility of engineering to the blind. The testbeds enhance the research infrastructure of the PI?s lab, and the haptic devices enhance the educational infrastructure in universities, in high schools, and in schools for the blind.