Page 17 - Flexible Robotics in Medicine

Preface: A design journey of biorobotic

motion generation mechanisms and flexible

continuum system development

The primary motivation of the book is to document our design journey of biorobotic motion
generation mechanisms and flexible continuum system development. Practical hands-on
trials and errors for the growing clinical needs concurrently promote critical thinking of
flexible robotics in terms of platform creation. The book involves problem-solving and
design-centric approaches toward research on flexible robotic systems. The robotic
development pipeline includes the state of the arts, the assessments of the clinical
background and unmet needs, the engineering principles involved, model analysis, design
evaluations, characterization, and modeling of biomedical engineering systems. The book is
primarily for biorobotics beginners to have an overview of the design journey in continuum
motion generation mechanisms and flexible surgical robotics.
The book focuses on the motion generation methods and proof-of-concept prototyping
involved in the journey of design-centric biomedical robotics. The problems are generally
clinically driven in real-world scenarios, so the solution domain is typically open and
complex. For example, a common clinical problem in the subsequent chapters is to design
mini-endoscopic flexible mechanisms that can navigate in a nasal cavity for surveillance.

The journey of design-centric projects in developing flexible mechanisms typically starts
from fundamental conceptualizations, going through the development pipeline until the final
prototypes. Design-centric biorobotic prototyping being a highly iterative process, the
generations of designs of each chapter show logical flow and justifications to overcoming
problems and limitations and ultimately to bring a design concept to an optimal prototype
reality. Literature critique and technology comparisons are to expose the idea of innovation.
The first-hand interactions and review in clinic real-world problems reduce abstractions of
the design thinking and add a unique dimension to each chapter of biomedical robotic design.
The chapters of the book typically cover the critical milestone in developing a prototype,
including clinical background, needs, design conceptualization, specifications, competitiveness
survey, design rationale, modeling, verification, patent review, and regulatory affairs.

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