Device design and control is key to the operation of all medical and health robotics, since they interact physically with their environment. One of the most important technical challenges is in the area mechanisms. For instance, in surgical applications, the smaller a robot is, the less invasive the procedure is for the patient accordingly. And in most procedures, the results increased dexterity in more efficient and accurate surgeries. We also consider the possibility of cellular scale surgery; proof of concept of this has already been implemented in the laboratory. Another example is rehabilitation; current rehabilitation robots are large and relegated to the clinic. Similarly, human physical therapists have limited availability. For many patients, effective long term therapy calls clearly for longer and more frequent training sessions than is affordable or practical in the clinic.
Human scale wearable devices, or at least ones that can be easily carried home, would allow rehabilitative therapies to be applied in unprecedented ways. At the end, consider a dexterous prosthetic hand. To fully replicate the joints of a real hand, using current mechanisms, power sources, and actuators designs would require the hand to be too heavy or large for human to use naturally. Small, dexterous mechanisms would make great strides toward more life-like prosthetic limbs.
Miniaturization challenge in large part because current electromechanical actuators are relatively large. Biological analogs are far superior to engineered systems in terms of compactness, low impedance, energy efficiency, and high force output. These biological systems often combine actuation and mechanisms into an integrated, inseparable system. Novel mechanism design will go hand in hand with actuator development. Every actuator or mechanism combination will need to be controlled for it to achieve its full potential behavior, especially when dexterity is required. Models need to be developed in order to optimize control strategies, this may even motivate the design of mechanisms that are especially straightforward to model.
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