Wireless Millimeter-Size Soft Climbing Robots with Omnidirectional Steerability on Tissue Surfaces.

Wirelessly actuated miniature soft robots actuated by magnetic fields that can overcome gravity by climbing soft and wet tissues are promising for accessing challenging enclosed and confined spaces with minimal invasion for targeted medical operation. However, existing designs lack the directional steerability to traverse complex terrains and perform agile medical operations. Here we propose a rod-shaped millimeter-size climbing robot that can be omnidirectionally steered with a steering angle up to 360 degrees during climbing beyond existing soft miniature robots. The design innovation includes the rod-shaped robot body, its special magnetization profile, and the spherical robot footpads, allowing directional bending of the body under external magnetic fields and out-of-plane motion of the body for delivery of medical patches. With further integrated bio-adhesives and microstructures on the footpads, we experimentally demonstrated inverted climbing of the robot on porcine gastrointestinal (GI) tract tissues and deployment of a medical patch for targeted drug delivery.

Development and application of a multi-centre cloud platform architecture for water environment management.

To promote the intelligent and accurate management of river basins, especially large basins which involve many catchments, it is highly required to develop a useful platform to effectively coordinate arithmetic resources and data, and simultaneously help to make decisions based on the real-time calculation. In this study, a multi-centre cloud platform architecture called 3L4C was constructed, which includes a Cloud-edge-terminal Layer (3L), data centre, model centre, control centre, and customer-service centre (4C). Data fusion technology and an air-land-water coupled model were constructed. Based on HTML5, JavaScript, and Java, an integrated water environment management platform was created and applied to the Three Gorges Reservoir Basin, China. The platform was tested and successfully used for automatic water quality prediction, water environment pollution analysis and control, early warning of abnormal water quality, and emergency water pollution incident evaluation. This platform quickly and accurately forecasts and perfectly displays past, present and future state of the water environment, and offers beneficial support for management decisions in various water environment departments.

Delta Robot Kinematic Calibration for Precise Robot-Assisted Retinal Surgery.

High precision is required for ophthalmic robotic systems. This paper presents the kinematic calibration for the delta robot which is part of the next generation of Steady-Hand Eye Robot (SHER). A linear error model is derived based on geometric error parameters. Two experiments with different ranges of workspace are conducted with laser sensors measuring displacement. The error parameters are identified and applied in the kinematics to compensate for modeling error. To achieve better accuracy, Bernstein polynomials are adopted to fit the error residuals after compensation. After the kinematic calibration process, the error residuals of the delta robot are reduced to satisfy the clinical requirements.