Seminar
“Flexible Robots for Minimally Invasive Surgery”
Revanth R. Konda, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract: Flexible robots have found numerous applications in minimally invasive procedures due to their inherent compliance and great potential for operating in unstructured, dynamic, and highly constrained environments. This talk will highlight the employment of such systems to address the challenges associated with endovascular interventions, which are minimally invasive procedures to treat cardiovascular diseases. Endovascular interventions require physicians to manually navigate a slender passive wire, called a guidewire, through narrowed arteries for reaching a target location to perform procedures such as angioplasty and stent placement. Navigating the arteries through manual insertion is challenging due to tortuosity of these vasculatures and lack of active steerability at the guidewire tip. To address these challenges, my research has focused on the development of tendon-driven robotically steerable guidewires, which are micro-scale continuum robots with the ability to bend at their tip. In this talk, the design and analysis of two different robotically steerable guidewire systems will be highlighted. Firstly, a design iteration of the COaxially Aligned Steerable (COAST) guidewire robot to vary the plane of bending without rotating the entire guidewire body, will be presented. Secondly, a linear-to-rotary mechanism, utilizing two tubes with their distal end machined with specific patterns, to achieve distal rotation in robotically steerable guidewires, will be discussed. Modeling approaches to capture the behavior of the aforementioned robotic systems and relevant experimental results will be presented. The talk will conclude with discussion on potential future research directions in the area of tendon-driven, robotically steerable guidewires.
Bio: Dr. Revanth Konda is a postdoctoral fellow from the Medical Robotics and Automation Laboratory (RoboMed Lab) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he has been working on the development of micro-scale and meso-scale continuum robots for minimally invasive procedures. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) in December 2023, where his research focused on the design and analysis of various soft robots, soft actuators, and artificial muscles. He also holds an M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Northern Illinois University and a B.S. degree in Mechatronics Engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, India. His research contributions have been published in prestigious venues such as Science Robotics, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Soft Robotics, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and American Control Conference, among others. Due to his academic achievements he has received numerous honors among which the most notable ones are the 2021 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL) best paper award, awarded to five papers out of more than thousand RAL publications (top 0.4%), invited for the 2023 DSCD Rising Stars Invited Talks, the 2022 UNR “Honor the Best” Outstanding Graduate Student Researcher Award, and the 2023 UNR “Honor the Best” Outstanding Graduating Graduate Student Award, with the last two awards presented to only one student from the entire student body at UNR (more than 4000 students).
For a zoom link please contact Kate Harrison at kharrison@wpi.edu