Simulation analysis of flexible grippers in vascular interventional surgery robot

The vascular interventional surgery robot (VISR) can protect surgeons from radiation exposure. The robot provides high-precision guidewire/catheter control during the operation, but its flexibility is still not as good as that of human fingers. The main reason is that the robot cannot accurately control the guidewire/catheter and measure the clamping force at the same time. Another problem is that the rigid surgical instruments will not respond to pressure changes in time, which was easy to cause endovascular damage. In order to solve this problem, a parallel multi-fingered flexible gripper structure was proposed. The small-sized gripper can stably clamp the guidewire/catheter in a narrow surgical space. By simulating the clamping process with Mooney-Rivlin model, the suitable size of grippers for operation is selected. In addition, the simulation results show that the clamping deformation can be controlled by changing the moving distances, which will directly affects the range of the maximum sliding stress. It means that the propose flexible gripper can cushion the sudden stress in surgery and provide more flexible functions for deploying surgical robots.