The Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics (HSMR) is now in its 13th year and has provided an annual forum for surgeons and engineers from across the globe to network and explore the latest developments in medical robotics. Every year researchers, clinicians and engineers are invited to submit papers on a range of topics covering clinical specialities in Urology, Cardiac Surgery, Neuro Surgery, Thoracic Surgery, General Surgery, Gynaecology, ENT, Orthopaedic and Paediatric Surgery.

This year we plan to build beyond the previous achievements and take the symposium to even higher successes with the theme of ‘Surgery and Beyond’. We have already received full CPD accreditation from the Royal College of Surgeons and to complement this we are planning a programme with increased focus on clinical practitioner centered talks, workshops and presentations.

Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics 2021: Workshop

Micro- and nanorobots have demonstrated their ability to perform a number of tasks at small scales, such as noninvasive diagnostics, localized targeted drug delivery, cell select, and minimally invasive surgery.

More recently, soft and flexible architectures have appeared to be exciting area where challenges in designing, modeling, micromachining, and controlling have to be investigated. As one can observe that micro-nanorobotics is a multi- and interdisciplinary field that combines aspects of robotics, micro- and nanotechnology, biomedical engineering, and materials science.

A significant example is the investigation of two-photon polymerization (TPP) to fabricate micro-nanorobots. Unlike traditional microfabrication techniques, 4D printing provides higher versatility, more sophisticated designs, and various method of sensing and actuation, opening wide new avenues for the next generation of micro-nanorobots. The latter can be tethered through the development of soft continuum robots, and untethered through flexible microswimmers. It brings disruptive solutions in terms of variety of stimuli, workspaces, motion complexities, response time, function execution, and genuinely 3D microrobots.

The aim of this workshop is to provide most recent and original results showing the successful achievements from small scales robotics and medical tasks point of view. It will notably target discussions about current most challenging research topics in this field.

The current pandemic prevented the small-scale robotics community to have its dedicated conference for two years. We are expecting up to 100 participants according to the audience of recent workshops on microrobotics.

Learning Outcomes

After completing this workshop, attendees will be expected to be able to:

• • Describe the basic performance and specifications of micro/nano robots in medical context.
  • Explain the key issues in implementation of medical micro/nano robots.
  • Understand diverse medical small-scale robots from Lab on Chip to in human applications.
  • Explain the ideas of swarm micro/nanorobots, soft medical robots, biological small-scale robots, and their current and future applications.

Programme

• 16:00-16:02: Introduction & Welcome
• 16:02-16:27: Engineering in Precision Medicine, Ali Khademhosseini, Terasaki Institute
• 16:27-16:42: Targeted delivery of neuronal cells with a magnetically controlled microrobot for a selective artificial neural network, Hongsoo Choi, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology
• 16:42-16:57: Magnetic microswarm for biomedical applications: opportunities and challenges, Li Zhang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• 17:57-17:07: Break
• 17:07-17:22: Magnetically-Actuated Surgical Robots, Eric Diller, University of Toronto
• 17:22-17:37: Surface tension based robotic toward compact microrobot for surgery, Antoine Barbot, CNRS, UB
• 17:37-17:52: Exploiting elastohydrodynamic coupling in microrobot navigation, Selman Sakar, EPFL
• 17:52-18:00: Closing Discussion
• 18:00 – Networking (Zoom rooms for discussion, limited places)

This workshop is worth 2 CPD points, please register to qualify for certification.