Section: Application Domains

Surgery

Surgical procedures are often carried out using instruments made from stiff materials that interact with delicate biological tissues such as internal organs, blood vessel walls and small cavities. This is one of the source of danger for many surgical procedures. Soft-robotics open up new perspectives in minimally invasive approaches. Thanks to the highly deformability of their structure, similar to organic materials, and their motion, created by deformation in the same way as the muscles in living animals, they offer many advantage for surgical applications. Recent work anticipates that their compliant nature and their large number of degrees of freedom will provide key surgical positive outcomes:

• Improving the capacity of access with security to the fragile parts of the anatomy by applying less pressure to the anatomical walls

• Easy maneuvering through soft and confined spaces allowing new Minimally Invasive Surgery approaches.

These positive outcomes are expected given the properties of soft-robot. In a recent state-of-the art reports on soft robotics, surgery in the list of killer applications of soft-robotics. However, the lack of existing methodology for modeling and control remains an obstacle to be proved by a practical implementation. Given our background on surgical simulations: soft tissue and tool/tissues contact models we are particularly well positioned to address the challenge of using soft-robots in surgery.