CAREER Award Supports Surgical Robots

Nabil Simaan, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Advanced Robotics and Mechanism Applications (ARMA) Laboratory, has received a CAREER Award, the NSF's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty. Simaan will be developing novel, flexible snake-like robots and parallel robots that will improve success of future minimally invasive surgery paradigms. These robots will gauge their force interactions with the patient's anatomy, gather information, and then act on that information.

 

One of the latest surgical paradigms is NOTES, Natural Orifice Trans-luminal Endoscopic Surgery, which uses the natural openings in the body to reach the affected organ and perform surgery on it. Unfortunately, current surgical systems are bulky and can not support these new surgical paradigms. There is a need for new down-scalable surgical robots that provide access to the deepest anatomical organs with minimal damage to surrounding anatomy. For example, surgery could be performed on the abdomen by reaching through the patient's mouth, past the esophagus, and through an incision in the stomach. Such robots will be of little use if they are not equipped with some basic forms of intelligence, another aspect addressed by Simaan's CAREER proposal.

 

"My surgical robots will be able to perform many other surgical functions," says Simaan, "and they will safeguard against damage to the anatomy by acting as intelligent intervention and information gathering tools for assisting surgeons during increasingly complex procedures. The objective of this research is to provide the theoretical foundation for modeling and control of flexible robots for intelligent and safe interaction with the anatomy."

 

"Intelligence" in this case refers to the ability of these robots to gauge their force interaction with the anatomy, gather information about the anatomy, and act based on this information, he says. Screw theory and stochastic estimation methods are used for modeling the ability of these robots to estimate their wrench interaction with the anatomy by using intrinsic and extrinsic sources of information. These performance measures are used in hybrid force control algorithms that allow characterizing shape, stiffness, and anatomical constraints governing safe maneuvering of suspended organs.

 

"This research will advance the field robotics by addressing control and resolution of multi-point contact problems for compliant insertion control and bracing against soft environments," says Simaan. "It promises to revolutionize medical robotics by introducing novel algorithms for designing and controlling surgical robots capable of safe interaction and manipulation of the patient's anatomy."