Capabilities of Caturo: The smallest concentric tube robot ever
One vital thing in medicine is the safety and need for technology that help in making the treatment process effective. To take it further, scientists have come up with the smallest concentric tube robot named Caturo for the purpose of microsurgery. The capabilities of Caturo are extremely impressive.
Creating compact and flexible robots and instruments makes them safer and easier to maneuver in delicate biological environments. To that end, Nwafor and his colleagues, including team leader Kanty Rabenorosoa, associate professor in the Department of Automatic Control and Micro-Mechatronic Systems (AS2M) at the FEMTO-ST Institute in Besancon, France, created Caturo, the world’s smallest concentric tube robot.
“Caturo was born out of a need to develop a special type of microrobot capable of tackling the daunting challenge of microsurgery,” Nwafor explained. “Most especially, areas requiring a tiny sub-millimetre opening to allow the microrobot access to a hard-to-reach surgical site and without any reliance on the surrounding environment or body tissue to reach the desired site.
“A typical example is eye surgery, which requires a flexible robot whose entire body configuration can be controlled and monitored [without causing any unwanted damage] due to its size — too small for conventional robots — and its complex and fragile internal compositions.”
Concentric tube robots have been around for about ten years and have shown very interesting capabilities for minimally invasive procedures like scarless surgeries. Concentric tube robots, in fact, are the smallest continuum robots and can achieve highly controlled body configurations and movement.
Caturo
Caturo’s capabilities were demonstrated in a variety of ways, including constrained path deployment through 1mm wide sewing needles to demonstrate its maneuverability. Fluid removal and delivery operations were used to test its ability to deliver drugs or perform procedures such as biopsies.
“In addition, an experimental test with a single fisheye was performed, followed by laser transmission through pre-curves optical fibre,” Nwafor explained. “This demonstrates Caturo’s numerous medical application prospects, though the next phase is working towards clinical trials via improvements and possible commercialization in the near future.”
After completing this proof-of-concept prototype, the team will focus on expanding medical applications by improving on Caturo’s design, such as increasing the number of pre-curved tubes for greater flexibility and microfabrication of various end effectors for various surgical tasks.
“We need to keep improving the overall robotic system,” Nwafor said. “It could take another three to four years. Meanwhile, Virtuoso Surgical has recently made commercially available concentric tube robots made by Nitinol — thus, we believe that the proposed approach for pre-curving composite tubes will only grow in popularity.”
