Deformation detection and tracking on continuous and deformable medical tools

Soft robotics is an already established research field within the bio-inspired robotic community. The use of this material has the potentials to leads to machines that are more adaptable, capable, and safer than the existing ones. Different are the application domains where soft robots can be advantageous. Among them, one that seems very promising is related to Minimal Invasive Surgery. In order to advance toward the development of novel medical devices that act as a continuous, and that are capable to adapt their shape according to the needs, it is fundamental to provide them sensing ability. In this paper we present a novel method to measure deformations that occur over a continuum deformable device. Our approach uses a stretchable smart skin, and bases its sensing capabilities on a tomographic imaging technique that allow to have a distributed sensing independent from the underplaying design.