TY - JOUR
AU - Schächtele, Jonathan
AB -  In modern minimally invasive surgery there is a need for surgical instruments with enhanced articulation and easy electrical control. Therefore electronically controllable actuators are necessary. Within this paper the approach of hydraulically driven instruments is presented. Actuator concepts and prototypes as well as first experimental results are shown and discussed. Keywords: micro hydraulics, actuators, surgical instrument, electrical input device, position sensor challenge in miniaturization is to provide high pressure piston sealing with low leakage and low friction. In order to prove feasibility of hydraulic piston cylinder actuation prototypes have been realized and characterized. Results will be shown later in this paper. The second concept to drive the tip of an instrument is a hydraulic bellow actuator. In passive state, this bellow has a cylindrical geometry with an s-shaped wall. With increasing hydraulic pressure the curves are stretched into a tube shape by bending. This causes an increase in length of the bellows. The idea is to produce such bellows by rapid prototyping technology, completely integrated into the instrument tip. Due to the high deformation ratios needed, materials with super-elastic properties have to be applied, such as shape memory alloys. A third alternative to these actuators are artificial hydraulic 
TI - Powerful Micro-Actuators for (Flexible) Surgical Instrument Tips
JF - Biomedical Engineering / Biomedizinische Technik
DO - 10.1515/bmt-2013-4397
DA - 2013-09-07
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/de-gruyter/powerful-micro-actuators-for-flexible-surgical-instrument-tips-1YEmt0ik8W
DP - DeepDyve
ER -