surgical snake robots

The era of minimally invasive surgery heralded a paradigm shift in patient safety during surgical interventions. By operating through small incisions, surgeons can significantly reduce the trauma to the patient compared to open procedures, with minimized blood loss, lower rates of infection and reduced hospitalization periods. However, a challenge of operating through an incision is the reduced  dexterity the surgeon has over their tools inside the patient’s body. 

I worked in a team as part of the i-Snake project where we developed a series of snake-like robotic devices that can intelligently navigate within the patient’s body from a single access point. I developed robotic hardware including the multi degree-of-freedom external drive system for bimanual instrumentation, hand-held user interfaces, robotic joint prototypes and adjunct devices for confocal probe manipulation within the robot lumen.