Soft Pouch Robots for Minimally Invasive Surgeries and Beyond
Ronald Fearing, Professor
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Applications for Spring 2025 are closed for this project.
We are looking for students interested in robot design, fabrication, and testing of pouch-based robots, for applications in minimally invasive surgery and beyond.
Current surgical tools cannot navigate tortuous anatomical corridors, and as a result, accessing certain locations requires extensive tissue removal, general anesthesia, and a full operating room. In collaboration with UCSF, we're developing a soft, deformable robot capable of visualizing and freely navigating complex anatomical environments while creating a working tool channel that minimally disturbs surrounding tissues. This device has the potential to expand the capabilities of any complex endoscopic surgical procedure.
The robot that we’re building consists of a series of thin-film pneumatic pouches that can sequentially inflate and deflate and move the body of the robot forward. We have developed a way to fabricate pouches of a variety of sizes, shapes, and structures. With this technology, we are planning to develop robots not just for endonasal surgery, but also other applications that can take advantage of the pouches’ extremely low weight, small compressed size, and high expansion ratio.
Role: Role:
- Designing soft pouch robots
- Fabricating soft pouch robots using various equipment in lab, including flatbed printers, laser cutting, 3D printers, laminator, and heat press
- Iterating on robot designs for improvement
- Building test setups for characterizing these robots
- Robot kinematics/dynamics characterization
- Improving current fabrication process if needed
Undergrads in this project are trained with the goal of helping them become good researchers, publish papers as co-authors, and get into top PhD programs.
Qualifications: Qualifications:
We're looking for someone dedicated to do a PhD and are certain they can put in the time commitment. They will be heavily involved in the project and become co-authors on conference/journal publications.
Necessary:
- strong interest in hardware robotics research (this role is 95% hardware, minimal software)
- planning to do a PhD
Highly preferred:
- prior experience with any hardware/fabrication
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Yifan You, Ph.D. candidate
Hours: 12 or more hours
Related website: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/admt.202401052
Related website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyvW0w9dZbk