Smart Surgical End-Effectors

The small scale of minimally-invasive surgical procedures presents significant challenges to developing robust, smart, and dexterous tools and end-effectors for manipulating millimeter and sub-millimeter anatomical structures (e.g. vessels or nerves) and surgical equipment (e.g. sutures or staples). To meet the demand, we are developing a versatile fabrication process, based on printed circuit board manufacturing techniques, to create monolithic, kinematically complex, three-dimensional machines in parallel at the millimeter to centimeter scales. During lamination, precisely aligned material layers are combined in different ways to create functional layers that serve a specific purpose, including structural layers, flexure layers that enable rotary joints and articulated structures, printed circuit board (PCB) layers, metal spring layers, or low-friction sliding bearing layers. Finally, various functional layers combine to create multi-structure, multi-material, quasi-2D laminates capable of folding into complex 3D structures.

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