Soft surgical robots: state of the art, current research efforts

• Soft/Stiffness-controllable robotic structures in medicine
• Actuation and stiffening mechanisms
• Merging soft robotics and reconfigurable mechanisms: state of the art, current research efforts
• Design: basic architectures, optimization, scaling for medical robotics
• Haptic interfaces for surgical applications
• Controllability, stability of shape-changing devices in constraining environments
• Future direction of development in soft surgical robots
• Dynamic interaction modeling, especially in respect to soft-tissue environments
• Shape sensing (optical fibers, magnetic tracking, image processing (optical/medical images))
• Growing robot technologies
• Advanced functional materials for shape-, color-changing robots
• Multi-material rapid prototyping/3D printing
• Smart and active materials
• Emerging fabrication techniques for shape changing systems
• Adaptive sensor morphology and morphological computation
• Modelling and simulation techniques of shape-changing robots
• Bio-mimetic and bio-inspired devices for medical applications
• Testing and clinical validation of soft manipulators in MIS environments
• Soft sensing for soft robots
• Kinematic and dynamics modelling and control of soft robots devices for medical applications