Multi Jet Fusion of Nylon-12: a Viable Method to 3D-Print Concentric Tube Robots?

EasyChair Preprint 8148

Abstract

Concentric Tube Robots (CTRs) are tentacle-like robotic manipulators conceived for applications in minimally-invasive surgery. CTRs are typically made of Nickel-Titanium (NiTi) tubes, which can be expensive to source and difficult to process. We present a study on the viability of fabricating CTRs using Multi Jet Fusion (MJF) of Nylon-12, a type of elastic polymer commonly used in additive manufacturing. We note that Nylon-12 was already evaluated for the purpose of building CTRs in prior work, but fabrication was performed with Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), which produced unsatisfactory results. Ours is the first study to evaluate the suitability of MJF to 3D-print CTRs. MJF promises to overcome the challenges typically associated with NiTi manufacturing, and to open up the way to the creation of procedure- and patient-specific robots.

Keyphrases: 3D printing, Additive Manufacturing, concentric tube robot, continuum robot

@booklet{EasyChair:8148,
  author    = {Kalani Picho and Brandon Persons and Jesse d'Almeida and Nicholas Pacheco and Colin Reynolds and Loris Fichera},
  title     = {Multi Jet Fusion of Nylon-12: a Viable Method to 3D-Print Concentric Tube Robots?},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 8148},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}