A Transient FEA-based Methodology for Designing Soft Surgical Manipulators

Abstract

Traditionally, any new development in soft robotics has to come first through many trial-and-error experiments. Many researchers tried to develop analytical models either to study certain phenomena in an already existed deigns or to use them to enhance soft robots performance. However, there is no general methodology that can be used to design any arbitrary soft robot from scratch. Such methodology should have the ability to test different operation scenarios for checking certain control approaches or certain types of sensors and actuators. This paper introduces a general tool for developing soft surgical manipulators, which is based on transient finite element analysis (FEA). To verify the feasibility of the proposed approach, experiments have been conducted on a fabricated soft manipulator. The test setup incorporates pressure sensors and vision tracking system to record the manipulator trajectory. Air pressure measurements are used as input to FEA for transient simulation. The experimental results demonstrate high level of agreement with FEA results and prove that the suggested approach is promising to be used in designing new soft surgical robots.