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Soft Robotics and Applied Control

Soft and flexible robotic systems for affordable healthcare.

Head of Group

B414B Bessemer Building
South Kensington Campus

What we do

Our research investigates fundamental aspects of control of soft and flexible robots for surgery. These include harnessing the intrinsic compliance of soft robots, rejecting disturbances that characterise the surgical environment, and complying with stringent safety requirements. Our ambition is to provide affordable robotic solutions for a range of surgical applications, including endoscopy, percutaneous intervention, and multi-handed surgery.

Why it is important?

Robotics for healthcare is one of the fastest growing segments in the global robotics market. However, conventional surgical robots are unaffordable in low-resource settings. Harnessing the potential of soft and flexible robots can contribute to making surgery safter, more accurate, and more accessible in low-middle income countries. These are pressing needs due to the aging population, and to the growing workforce crisis in the healthcare market.

How can it benefit patients?

Our work aims to improve accuracy, reduce the risk of injury, and reduce discomfort in percutaneous interventions such as biopsy, in diagnostic and interventional endoscopy, and in multi-handed surgery.

Dr Enrico Franco
Lecturer

Citation

BibTex format

@inproceedings{Runciman:2023:10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10161573,
author = {Runciman, M and Franco, E and Avery, J and Rodriguez, y Baena F and Mylonas, G},
doi = {10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10161573},
pages = {1--7},
publisher = {IEEE},
title = {Model based position control of soft hydraulic actuators},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10161573},
year = {2023}
}

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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - In this article, we investigate the model based position control of soft hydraulic actuators arranged in an an-tagonistic pair. A dynamical model of the system is constructed by employing the port-Hamiltonian formulation. A control algorithm is designed with an energy shaping approach, which accounts for the pressure dynamics of the fluid. A nonlinear observer is included to compensate the effect of unknown external forces. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, and experiments achieve positioning accuracy of 0.043 mm with a standard deviation of 0.033 mm in the presence of constant external forces up to 1 N.
AU  - Runciman,M
AU  - Franco,E
AU  - Avery,J
AU  - Rodriguez,y Baena F
AU  - Mylonas,G
DO  - 10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10161573
EP  - 7
PB  - IEEE
PY  - 2023///
SP  - 1
TI  - Model based position control of soft hydraulic actuators
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10161573
UR  - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10161573
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/104013
ER  -