i-Snake® wins ICRA Best Medical Robotics Paper Award

Christopher Payne, Jianzhong Shang, Guang-Zhong Yang, David Noonan, James Clark and Mikael Sodergren from The Hamlyn Centre win the ICRA Best Medical Robotics Paper Award

“Better Robots, Better Life” – under the expectation of continuing advances in robotics for reshaping the human society, IEEE International Conference Robotics and Automation (ICRA) celebrated another annual gathering of the robotics community in May 2011. One highlight of the ICRA conference is the award ceremony and the team from the Hamlyn Centre won the Best Medical Robotics Paper Award this year.

The paper entitled “An articulated universal joint based flexible access robot for minimally invasive surgery” introduced the key design features of the joint mechanism used by i-Snake®. It incorporates a unique hybrid tendon-micromotor arrangement that allows for fully controllable articulation of the robot whilst maintaining large inner channels for endoscopic imaging probes and surgical instruments. Dr Jian-Zhong Shang who presented the paper at the conference, described the detailed mechatronic design of the system, as well as in vivo animal experiment results of the robot for performing trans-vaginal tubal ligation procedures.

The ICRA Best Medical Robotics Paper Award is sponsored by Intuitive Surgical to recognise outstanding work in the area of medical robotics and computer assisted interventional devices and systems, with specific emphases on technological innovation and clinical efficacy.

Congratulating the team on this new award, Professor Guang-Zhong Yang, Director of the Hamlyn Centre said “This is a great recognition to our multidisciplinary team who have been working hard to bring a bold engineering concept to reality. There are still significant hurdles ahead of us in translating our research results into routine clinical practice, but I am confident that this will happen in the near future.”

The i-Snake® research programme is sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and the main focus of the work is on developing a fully articulated snake robot that integrates imaging and sensing to address key limitations of the current rigid instrument and laparoscope design of minimally invasive surgery. A range of challenging research issues are being addressed by the Hamlyn team, including joint articulation, integrated sensing, navigation and control, in situ-in vivo imaging and tissue characterisation, motion tracking and surgical navigation under active constraints. By integrating imaging and sensing with kinematically enhanced instrument, the i-Snake® robot will facilitate intra-luminal or extra-luminal curved anatomical pathway navigation, thus enabling an expansion of applications for robotic assisted MIS for performing intra-thoracic or pericardial (i.e. cardiac), intra-luminal therapy (vascular and gastrointestinal) and intra- cavity procedures. The i-Snake® robot is expected to make significant advances in robotic surgery and ensure a greater success in the development of future clinical robotic systems.