This book highlights the principles, design and characterization of mechanically compliant soft and foldable robots. Traditional rigid robots with bulky footprints and complicated components prolong the design iteration and optimization for keyhole and minimally invasive transluminal applications. Therefore, there is an interest in developing soft and foldable robots with remote actuation, multimodal sensing and machine intelligence. This book discusses the use of foldable and cuttable structures to design biomimetic deployable soft robots, that can exhibit a fair number of motions with consistency and repeatability. It presents the overall design principles, methodology, instrumentation, metamorphic sensing, multi-modal perception, and machine intelligence for creating untethered foldable active structures. These robotic structures can generate a variety of motions such as wave induction, compression, inchworm, peristalsis, flipping, tumbling, walking, swimming, flexion/extension etc.Remote actuation can control motions along regular and irregular surfaces from proximal sides. For self-deployable medical robots, motion diversity and shape reconfiguration are crucial factors. Deployable robots, with the use of malleable and resilient smart actuators, hold this crucial advantage over their conventional rigid robot counterparts. Such flexible structures capable of being compressed and expanded with intelligence perceptions hold enormous potential in biomedical applications.
Hongliang Ren received his Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering (Specialized in Biomedical Engineering) from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2008. He served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Automation Science & Engineering (T-ASE), Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing (MBEC) among the other 6 journals. He has navigated his academic journey through the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Johns Hopkins University, Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, Children’s National Medical Center, United States, and the National University of Singapore. He is currently Associate Professor, Department of Electronic Engineering at Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering at the National University of Singapore. His areas of interest include biorobotics, intelligent control, medical mechatronics, soft continuum robots, soft sensors, and multisensory learning in medical robotics. He is therecipient of the NUS Young Investigator Award and Engineering Young Researcher Award, IAMBE Early Career Award 2018, Interstellar Early Career Investigator Award 2018, and ICBHI Young Investigator Award 2019.
He has won numerous international awards, including EMedic Global Gold Medal(2017) and Silver Medal(2021), Best Conference Paper Awards in IEEE ROBIO 2019, IEEE RCAR 2016, IEEE CCECE 2015, IEEE Cyber 2014, and IEEE ROBIO 2013 among 30+ others research awards. He delivered 70+ invited talks on intelligent surgical robotics/sensing at flagship conferences in medical robotics (10+ Plenary/keynotes), 40+ patents, and 3 books (Springer, Elsevier). The H-index (Google Scholar) of his publication profile is 50, with more than 9060+ citations as of July 2022.
