Advanced Soft Robotic System for In Situ 3D Bioprinting and Endoscopic Surgery

Abstract

Three‐dimensional (3D) bioprinting technology offers great potential in the treatment of tissue and organ damage. Conventional approaches generally rely on a large form factor desktop bioprinter to create in vitro 3D living constructs before introducing them into the patient's body, which poses several drawbacks such as surface mismatches, structure damage, and high contamination along with tissue injury due to transport and large open‐field surgery. In situ bioprinting inside a living body is a potentially transformational solution as the body serves as an excellent bioreactor. This work introduces a multifunctional and flexible in situ 3D bioprinter (F3DB), which features a high degree of freedom soft printing head integrated into a flexible robotic arm to deliver multilayered biomaterials to internal organs/tissues. The device has a master‐slave architecture and is operated by a kinematic inversion model and learning‐based controllers. The 3D printing capabilities with different patterns, surfaces, and on a colon phantom are also tested with different composite hydrogels and biomaterials. The F3DB capability to perform endoscopic surgery is further demonstrated with fresh porcine tissue. The new system is expected to bridge a gap in the field of in situ bioprinting and support the future development of advanced endoscopic surgical robots.

Soft Wearable Haptic Display and Flexible 3D Force Sensor for Teleoperated Surgical Systems

“…Using a neural network (NN) model, the soft 3D sensor can precisely detect interaction forces ( F = ( F x , F y , F z )) based on the change of the hydraulic pressures and the 3‐DoF fingertip cutaneous immediately reproduces these sensed 3D force with a mapping to the index fingertip through a tactor. In addition, each FBA is controlled by a motor housing [ 38 ] based on the signal change in three SFSs in the index finger, the middle finger, and the ring finger resulting in the position and direction change of the slave robotic arm (Figure 1a). A typical operating process of the proposed system is shown in Video S1, (Supporting Information).…”

“…Similarly, a linear translational motion is accomplished along the long axis when all three bellows are concurrently subjected to a combination of three hydraulic pressure values as shown. [ 38,42 ] In most existing surgical robots, when external translation motion is necessary, the proposed robot structure implies that the soft robotic arm can expand its length without moving the flexible body. When the bellows are activated, the soft robotic arm can move in a variety of motions, as shown in Figure 4b and Video S4 (Supporting Information).…”

Robotic in situ bioprinting for cartilage tissue engineering

“…However, further optimisation of the system is needed regarding a more versatile magnetic field and the miniaturization of the system body [143,151]. Additionally, Thai et al [144] have demonstrated a miniaturized high DoF extrusion-based soft robotic arm printhead fixed onto a flexible snake-like structure (figure 6(b)). This system enables bioprinting through MIS or using natural orifices to reach confined anatomical locations.…”

“…The aim should be to maintain the minimally invasive approach to surgery and ensure stable printing through arthroscopy portals, even though additional portals could be considered. Therefore, the development of soft snakelike systems and miniaturization or combination of bioprinting with surgical tools to enable precise minimally invasive manipulation within a complex or small area of cartilage tissue, although technically challenging and in the early stages of technological development, is highly desirable [24,143,144,[195][196][197][198][199][200][201]. Alternatively, and a more long-term prospect, the design and fabrication of small untethered soft-bodied robots for clinical use are appealing for MIS and cartilage repair [153,154,198,202].…”

Robotic Cardiac Compression Device Using Artificial Muscle Filaments for the Treatment of Heart Failure

“…The AMF is responsive, high speed (up to 20 Hz as reported in our previous study), and durable as well as has high contraction force and high energy efficiency. [65][66][67][68][69][70] In particular, it has a high elongation, meaning that the RCCD can be expanded to adapt to different heart sizes.…”