Chunbao Wang

Development of a novel paediatric surgical assist robot for tissue manipulation in a narrow workspace

Paediatric congenital esophageal atresia surgery typically requires delicate and dexterous operations in a narrow and confined workspace. This study aims to develop a novel robot assisted surgical system to address these challenges.,The proposed surgical robot consists of two symmetrical slave arms with nine degree of freedoms each. Each slave arm uses a rigid-dexterous configuration and consists of a coarse positioning manipulator and a distal fine operation manipulator. A small Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm (SCARA) mechanism was designed to form the main component of the coarse positioning unit, ensuring to endure large forces along the vertical direction and meet the operational demands. The fine positioning manipulator applied the novel design using flexible shafts and universal joints to achieve delicate operations while possessing a high rigidity. The corresponding kinematics has been derived and then was validated by a co-simulation that was performed based on the combined use of Adams and MATLAB with considering the real robot mass information. Experimental evaluations for the tip positioning accuracy and the ring transfer tasks have been performed.,The simulation was performed to verify the correctness of the derived inverse kinematics and demonstrated the robot’s flexibility. The experimental results illustrated that the end-effector can achieve a positioning accuracy within 1.5 mm in a confined 30 × 30 × 30 mm workspace. The ring transfer task demonstrated that the surgical robot is capable of providing a solution for dexterous tissue intervention in a narrow workspace for paediatric surgery.,A novel and compact surgical assist robot is developed to support delicate operations by using the dexterous slave arm. The slave arm consists of a SCARA mechanism to avoid experiencing overload in the vertical direction and a tool manipulator driven by flexible shafts and universal joints to provide high dexterity for operating in a narrow workspace.

Development of a robot MKW-II for hand and wrist rehabilitation training

With the aggravation of ageing society, the number of hemiplegic patients has increased rapidly. As a result, the requirement of rehabilitation training has made a huge increase. In order to help hemiplegic patients to get a better rehabilitation and help occupational therapists to reduce working pressure, series of rehabilitation training robot has been developed. Although the rehabilitation robot has been improved greatly for meeting various requirements, most of rehabilitation robots still just focus on rehabilitation training of single joint and neglect the recovery of damaged nervous system. In order to offer patients comprehensive rehabilitation training and help recovering nervous system, a new MKW series rehabilitation robots are designed to realize wrist and hand independent and cooperative training in our team. As the MKW-I is not convenient for use and its sensors accuracy would be heavily influenced by environment. Therefore, MKW-II is designed for better rehabilitation effectiveness. For these reasons, we propose the MKW-II, which can perfectly solve these problems. The improvement of mechanism structure and improvement of related sensors will be introduced detailly in this paper.

Study on synthesis and properties of nanoparticles loaded with amaryllidaceous alkaloids

Abstract Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common disease among the elderly people and a major social and medical problem. Amaryllidaceous alkaloids, acting as acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, represent a potential treatment of AD. However, they also have some deficiencies, such as extensive toxicity and widespread side effects. In order to improve the bioavailability and reduce the toxic and side effects, brain targeting of amaryllidaceous alkaloids was enhanced by considering low density lipoprotein (LDL) receptors of blood-brain barrier (BBB) endothelial cells as therapeutic targets. Amaryllidaceous alkaloids were highly selectively and quantitatively riveted to the surface of low density lipoproteins by using a new method - mild click chemistry. The structure of products has been characterized by NMR, FT-IR, and other methods. In addition, drug loading rate, encapsulation rate, and drug release by the nanoparticles were determined to assess the quality of the nanoparticles.

Development of parallel mechanism with six degrees of freedom for ankle rehabilitation

With the aging population problem getting more and more aggravated, the number of hemiplegia patients increases rapidly, which results in the increasing requirement of rehabilitation training for regaining the body movement function. Taking advantages of rehabilitation robots makes the rehabilitation training more scientific and efficient compared to traditional rehabilitation measures such as manual training. By now, many types of rehabilitation robots have been proposed by researchers. However, from the view of the physiological structure, many of them cant well fit the motion characteristics. Ankle plays an important role in standing, walking and so on. As the motion of these robots is different from the motion characteristics of ankles, it would make an undesired influence on the training effect. Rehabilitation robots have many structures, and they are mainly serial mechanism and parallel mechanism. However, serial mechanism is inconvenient to package. In this paper, a new type of parallel mechanism with six degrees of freedom is proposed. The basic principle structure of the ankle rehabilitation robot in this paper would be done according to the medical requirement and engineering requirement. After determine the programmer of the mechanism, the degrees of freedom of the mechanism would be calculated by the screw theory, and the Solid works software would be used to simulate and analyze the movement of the mechanism so that the torque and power calculation of key positions of the mechanism would be done with the simulation data. At last, the specific design of the mechanism would be finished with the obtained feasible basic principle structure. The function of different components would be introduced and this paper would check the key components to ensure the reliability of the mechanism.

Lower limb motion analysis based on inertial sensor

Up to now, with the increasing of the elderly population, more and more patients are suffering from hemiplegia. The need for hemiplegic rehabilitation is increasing quickly. As traditional rehabilitation, each patient must be treated by therapist, one by one. However, because of the different levels of therapists, the rehabilitation cannot be performed as the as the same. Normally, the rehabilitation status diagnosing is still be performed by therapists with the subjective experience. It caused the inhomogeneity on rehabilitation evaluation. It also sometimes causes negative influence on the rehabilitation effect. To solve these problems, many researches focusing on assessing the status of the hemiplegic patients quantitatively are proposed rehabilitation evaluation systems. Rehabilitation motion detection is the basis of the evaluation system, and it requires the participation of therapist. In this paper, a method is presented to detect lower limb motion of hemiplegic patients based on inertial sensor technology. The gesture quaternion of lower limb can be obtained through LPMS. With the matrix and Euler angle changing algorithm, combining with the simplified lower limb motion model, the rotation angle of joint can be computed. Finally, the curve of rotation angle of knee is established.

Development of a new parallel mechanism with five degrees of freedom for ankle rehabilitation

With the aging population problem getting more and more aggravated, the number of hemiplegia patients increases rapidly, which results in the increasing requirement of rehabilitation training for regaining the body movement function. Taking advantages of rehabilitation robots makes the rehabilitation training more scientific and efficient compared to traditional rehabilitation measures such as manual training. By now, many types of rehabilitation robots have been proposed by researchers. However, from the view of the physiological structure, many of them cant well fit the motion characteristics. Ankle plays an important role in standing, walking and so on. As the motion of these robots is different from the motion characteristics of ankles, it would make an undesired influence on the training effect. Rehabilitation robots have many structures, and they are mainly serial mechanism and parallel mechanism. However, serial mechanism is inconvenient to package. In this paper, a new type of parallel mechanism with five degrees of freedom was proposed. Compared to serial mechanism, parallel mechanism is convenient to package and it has larger motion area. It enables ankles to rotate around the rotary center of the ankle. With the screw theory, the degree of freedom was calculated. To verify the working space of the mechanism, the working space simulation was carried out by Matlab. Finally, the quantity and position of motors are determined.