The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twelve-month research fellowship by Dr. Ranjana Sahai to work with Dr. Paolo Dario at the Scuola Superiore Saint Anna Center of Research in Microengineering in Pontedera, Italy.
The overall goal of this project is to develop novel technologies for the actuation and locomotion of a biomimetic millirobot for minimally invasive surgery. The proposed surgical device will be capable of moving on and across tissues inside the human body and attaching itself to a moving tissue such as a beating heart in order to provide a stable surgical environment. The two main research objectives are, first to design and fabricate miniaturized newly developed actuating devices that are compact, energy efficient, easily controllable, and can be made biocompatible. They will be designed to actuate and control the biologically inspired locomotion of the millirobot. The second objective is to exploit recent technology developed dealing with biologically inspired dry adhesives. These gecko-like artificial hairs, when applied to the millirobot's feet, have the potential of allowing the proposed device to move inside the human body in a stable and reliable manner. It will also be made capable of attaching on and detaching from the tissues, even those that move, with ease.
The proposed research will help transfer creative advances in microrobotics to useful devices for minimally invasive surgery, generating research that should be of interest to not only engineers but the medical community as well.
