The challenge of vascular interventional surgery is that surgeons require to be exposed to X-ray for a long time, operating guidewires and catheters to complete the treatment. To reduce the burden of the surgeons, it is of great significance to develop a tactile sensing robot-assisted system for vascular interventional surgery. Therefore, a slave manipulator with the function of collaborative operating guidewires and catheters was developed to replace doctors to perform the surgery in the operating room. In addition, a master manipulator based on magnetorheological fluids was located on the master side, and the haptic force feedback of the system was realized by generating the tactile force acting on the doctor's hand. To verify the proposed system, a series of experiments were carried out, the results of experiments in “Vitro” indicated that the proposed system has good performance in collaborative operating and can accurately deliver a guidewire and a catheter to the target position. The maximum tracking error of the axial motion was less than 2 mm, and the maximum tracking error of the radial motion was less than 2 degrees, which is acceptable. And under the guidance of the force feedback, the safety of the system was obviously higher than that of without force feedback, after the experiment was completed by 5 participants, the safety increased by 4.32% on average. So, we can get the results that our system is feasible and effective.

In order to improve the ability of the spherical mobile robot to navigate and move autonomously in an unknown environment. This paper proposed a novel step optimal path planning method based on fuzzy control. Firstly, by analyzing the motion model of the spherical mobile robot, the arrangement and debugging of the ultrasonic sensors (HC-SR04) were completed. Then, through multi-sensor fusion technology and D-H parameter method, a fuzzy controller for the spherical mobile robot was designed. Finally, the proposed fuzzy control method was applied to the path planning of spherical mobile robot in unknown environment, and tested by a series of simulations and experiments. The results showed that the step optimal method based on fuzzy control could ensure that the spherical mobile robot completed the path planning. The experimental results also verified the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed novel path planning method.

This paper proposes an operation safety early warning system based on LabView (2014, National Instruments Corporation, Austin, TX, USA) for vascular interventional surgery (VIS) robotic system. The system not only provides intuitive visual feedback information for the surgeon, but also has a safety early warning function. It is well known that blood vessels differ in their ability to withstand stress in different age groups, therefore, the operation safety early warning system based on LabView has a vascular safety threshold function that changes in real-time, which can be oriented to different age groups of patients and a broader applicable scope. In addition, the tracing performance of the slave manipulator to the master manipulator is also an important index for operation safety. Therefore, we also transformed the slave manipulator and integrated the displacement error compensation algorithm in order to improve the tracking ability of the slave manipulator to the master manipulator and reduce master–slave tracking errors. We performed experiments “in vitro” to validate the proposed system. According to previous studies, 0.12 N is the maximum force when the blood vessel wall has been penetrated. Experimental results showed that the proposed operation safety early warning system based on LabView combined with operating force feedback can effectively avoid excessive collisions between the surgical catheter and vessel wall to avoid vascular puncture. The force feedback error of the proposed system is maintained between ±20 mN, which is within the allowable safety range and meets our design requirements. Therefore, the proposed system can ensure the safety of surgery.

In vascular interventional surgery (VIS), the doctors often need to be exposed to X-ray radiation for a long time, operate surgical instruments (Ex. Guidewires and catheters) to perform the operation, which is difficult to ensure the health of surgeons and the safety of operation. In addition, the force between the blood vessel wall and the surgical instrument is complex and variable, the existence of the external disturbance forces easily affects the judgment of the doctors. In this paper, to ensure the health and reduce the fatigue of the doctors, a novel tactile sensing robot-assisted system for VIS was developed to assist the surgeons to complete the operation. Then, the forces between the blood vessel and the surgical instrument during the surgery were analyzed. Besides, a self-developed force sensor was used to confirm the collision force between the tip of the catheter and the blood vessel wall. Finally, combining the haptic force feedback of the system and the developed force sensor, a series of experiments in “Vitro” were completed, and it was indicated by the experiment results that the accuracy of the force feedback can be improved by using the analysis method proposed in this paper, the collision force between the catheter tip and the blood vessel environment can be confirmed by the self-developed force sensor. Based on the results, the developed robot-assisted system for VIS has high safety.

In this article, we propose a novel magnetic-actuated multimodule drug sustained-release minirobot (DSM) manipulated by an external rotating electromagnetic field. The structure of the DSM is mainly divided into three parts: 1) a shell; 2) an internal propeller; and 3) a drug chamber. The shell can effectively protect the intestinal tract and reduce the various resistances during the work; the built-in propeller not only realizes active locomotion but also saves internal space, which provides the feasibility for the development of functional modules of the robot. The drug chamber pushes the carried drugs out of the chamber similar to a syringe. With structural optimization, we have realized the sustained-release and quantitative drug delivery based on the characteristics of minimagnets’ individual starting frequency- and pitch-related calculations. The main challenge to achieve these functions is to manipulate two magnets in the same magnetic field to drive different functional modules, without mutual interference between the two magnets. In this article, a series of simulations and experiments are conducted to evaluate DSM's motion performance, drug delivery function, and dose control during drug delivery. In the experiment, two different drug delivery points were set up to make DSM spray the drug on the fester areas twice respectively. Finally, an in vitro experiment using the DSM prototype was executed with fresh pig large intestine in a curved shape pipe mold.