Equipping medical devices with smart technologies holds great potential for the development of modern medical products. The development requires the identification of new integration strategies and the research of new material combinations due to the miniaturization of systems and increasing production figures. The realization of Smart Biomedical Devices requires a sufficient barrier effect (bioprotection) by appropriate encapsulation of the electronic components. Thinnest polymer coatings have proven to be suitable for conformal encapsulation. The aim of the study was to investigate the fundamental suitability of thin-film lacquers added with catalysts as coating materials for electronic systems with regard to their biological use. Due to long curing times of up to 14 days, eight different catalysts based on different chemical structures were added to the coating materials and their influence on a cytotoxic effect was investigated. A non-cytotoxic effect was observed for the organometallic catalysts based on tin, zirconium, titanium, bismuth, and tertiary amine. Most were resistant to steam sterilization. The curing time of the non-cytotoxic coatings could be significantly reduced by the addition of catalysts. The shortening of process times is an important economic aspect in the production of mass-produced Smart Biomedical Devices.

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Modern collaborative manipulators operate in unknown environments and share the work space with human coworkers. To ensure flexibility, their kinematic design is redundant which increases the solution space of the inverse kinematics (IK). We propose a real-time capable Predictive Kinematics Controller (PKC) that tracks task space trajectories as a first priority and computes optimal joint trajectories w.r.t. secondary objectives based on model predictive control (MPC). Therefor, the PKC solves a MPC problem in the nullspace of the task space trajectory. We benchmark a direct shooting, a direct collocation and an indirect gradient method in simulation and we identify the direct shooting method as the most efficient. We demonstrate the superior performance of the PKC compared to state-of-the-art local redundancy resolution approaches. In experiments, we show the real-time capability of our implementation.