Mentors
Project Description
With the advancement of rigid surgical robots, they have been increasingly used for a wide range of surgical procedures, offering improved safety and precision. However, soft surgical robots have been developed to provide a safer interaction with surgical environments. Despite this, the controllability and ability to generate forces in the desired direction of soft robots remain limited. Hybrid robots that leverage the benefits of both rigid and soft robots have been introduced to address these limitations, with fluidic control being a common approach.
In this project, the REU student will focus on developing a Raspberry PI based portable syringe pump to control a hybrid soft-rigid robot, building a software interface that communicates with the syringe pump and displays the estimated position of the hybrid robot in real-time, and running simple testing and robot validation experiments to characterize robot range of motion.
Research Participant
Program: MSE REU
Elenis Vergara MartÃnez, Research Experiences for Undergraduates.
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Research Goals
- Developing a Raspberry PI based portable syringe pump to control a hybrid soft-rigid robot,.
- Building a software interface that communicates with the syringe pump and displays the estimated position of the hybrid robot in real-time.
- Running simple testing and robot validation experiments to characterize robot range of motion.
Learning Goals
- Coding.
- Robot fabrication.
- Hypothesis testing.
- Robot validation.
Timeline
Weeks 1-5: Coding and robot fabribcation.
Weeks 6-10: Hypothesis testing and robot validation.