Proceedings of 2018 IEEE
International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation
August 5 - 8, Changchun, China
A Transient FEA-based Methodology for Designing Soft
Surgical Manipulators
Mohamed Elkeran1 and Mohamed Fanni1,2
1
Department of Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering, Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology, Egypt.
2
on leave: Department of Production Engineering and Mechanical Design, Faculty of Engineering, Mansoura University, Egypt.
{mohamed.elkeran & mohamed.fanni}@ejust.edu.eg
Abstract - Traditionally, any new development in soft robotics
has to come first through many trial-and-error experiments. Many
researchers tried to develop analytical models either to study
certain phenomena in an already existed deigns or to use them to
enhance soft robots performance. However, there is no general
methodology that can be used to design any arbitrary soft robot
from scratch. Such methodology should have the ability to test
different operation scenarios for checking certain control
approaches or certain types of sensors and actuators. This paper
introduces a general tool for developing soft surgical manipulators,
which is based on transient finite element analysis (FEA). To verify
the feasibility of the proposed approach, experiments have been
conducted on a fabricated soft manipulator. The test setup
incorporates pressure sensors and vision tracking system to record
the manipulator trajectory. Air pressure measurements are used as
input to FEA for transient simulation. The experimental results
demonstrate high level of agreement with FEA results and prove
that the suggested approach is promising to be used in designing
new soft surgical robots.
Index Terms – Soft robot, fiber-reinforced actuator, minimally
invasive surgery, finite element analysis.
I. INTRODUCTION
Soft robotics has become recently rich and prosperous
research field with many applications and designs [1].
Safety, compliance, maneuverability, and squishiness are
prominent features of soft robotics. Traditional robots are
comprised of rigid links and joints, whereas soft robots are
made from highly elastic material like silicone rubber [2].
When it comes to interact with a human being, traditional
rigid robots have to be kept in isolated or fenced areas like in
industrial environments. Safety precautions must be taken for
safe interaction with such rigid robots. Despite their
accuracy, speed, and productivity, rigid robots are not fully
safe in human interaction situations. Soft robots are paving a
new and safe way to cope with human centered interaction
applications. They are ideal for personal robots that interact
without causing harm to people, service robots, robots
working in unstructured environments, and medical robots,
especially for use in surgery [3].
Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is the most recently
applied strategy in surgical operations. It has many advantages
over the traditional open surgery, which involves reduced
patient pain, low cost, less bleeding and infection, and fast
convalescing. During the operation of MIS, only tiny skin
incisions are required to access the patient body to conduct the
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surgery. Despite the many gains of MIS for the patients, some
surgeons prefer to proceed with traditional open surgery
techniques due to minimal access. The surgeon hand can
accomplish agile tasks freely rather than the MIS tools that
lack dexterity and maneuverability. The traditional rigid tools
applied for MIS have limited number of degrees of freedom
(DOFs) besides being not easy to move and control. This in
turn requires more body interventions and more than one
surgeon to operate synchronously, which needs more practice
and steep learning curve. These drawbacks of MIS have
motivated new emergence of robotic platforms in surgery
[4, 5].
Conventional rigid robots have been widely applied for
MIS [5]. They offer high accuracy, however they have certain
limitations due to lack of dexterity which cause some surgical
tasks impossible to carry out. Moreover, if they were not well-
controlled by the surgeon, they would cause injuries to the
patient soft tissues. To overcome the lack of dexterity issue,
some researchers used hyper-redundant manipulators and
continuum-like robots for providing large number of DOFs
[6]. In spite of increased DOFs, hyper-redundant manipulators
are not straightforward to control, yet they poses drawbacks of
unsafe rigid robots. Soft-bodied robots can provide high
flexibility, dexterity, and safety when applied in MIS [3, 7].
They are inherently compliant and when they come to contact,
they introduce gentle force as they are more likely to deform
and absorb energy. This in turn decreases the possible harm of
approaching or even touching delicate structures such as
organs and tissues.
Throughout different designs and actuation techniques for soft
robots, flexible fluidic actuators (FFAs) have been widely employed
as a source of actuation, especially in MIS [8, 9]. They allow
different patterns of motion depending on their design, arrangement,
and actuation sequence. The primary motions of FFAs involve
elongation and omnidirectional bending. Air or water pressure are
the main input source to FFAs, which make them safe and
convenient for medical application. This advantage of FFAs qualifies
them over traditional electrically energized actuators such as motors,
shape memory alloys, and piezo-electric actuators. FFAs are easy to
fabricate, have very simple design, and encompass few parts to
manufacture and assemble. Among different available FFAs, the
three chamber FFA [3, 7, 8-10] seems to be the most vastly applied
actuator for soft robot actuation in MIS application. Since the soft
robot is composed of highly deformable elastomeric material, it
tends to expand upon actuation and may undergo ballooning [9].
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The design presented in Ref. [10] is adopted throughout this work
due to its advantage of embedded fibers around each chamber to
hamper the radial distortion and prevent ballooning.
Ref. [11] thoroughly reviewed the use of constant curvature
kinematics for continuum manipulators. Constant curvature
assumption simplifies the modeling of continuum robots and can
provide good approximations for its movements. However, this
approach exhibited large errors in cases of applied forces and
dynamic response. Researchers in [12, 13] utilized static FEA
for design and optimization of soft surgical manipulators. They
studied the shape of pneumatic chambers and its effect on
ballooning behavior and bending of the manipulator. Despite
that, they did not investigate the application of fiber-
reinforcement in their FEA studies. On the other hand, static
FEA cannot be used to check certain control approach or certain
operation scenario, which limit its use as a general design
methodology. Ref. [14] introduced a lumped model using
Lagrangian dynamics which represents the soft manipulator as a
series of infinitesimally rigid parts combined with springs and
dampers. That approach is promising and suitable for control
applications, however, it requires experimental estimation of
varying soft manipulator’s stiffness and damping parameters.
This experimental estimation is dependent on the fabricated soft
manipulator and cannot be assessed beforehand. Research work
by [15] presented a geometry deformation model for soft
continuum manipulators with fiber-reinforcement. The
developed model is comprehensive yet complex including many
assumptions in order to realize a better accordance to the
experimental work. Each of the previous approaches has its
certain assumptions and cannot be easily adapted to
accommodate new design modifications. The aim of this study is
to employ transient finite element analysis (FEA) as a general
tool for designing and inspecting the dynamic performance of
soft surgical manipulators. This will be demonstrated through
validation of transient FEA results against experimental work for
good agreement.
This paper is structured as follows. Section II presents the
soft manipulator design mentioning all dimensions and general
layout. Section III describes the used materials and their
properties along with the fabrication process. FEA is illustrated
in section IV with elaboration of meshing and boundary
conditions. Experimental results are discussed versus FEA
results in section V and conclusion is outlined in section VI.
II. MANIPULATOR DESIGN
The main structure for the surgical manipulator throughout
this work comprises three fiber-reinforced FFAs contained in a
soft silicone rubber enclosure as shown in Fig. 1. These
actuators are equally distributed at an angle of 120° between
each other. The manipulator has two parts, namely part I and
part II. Part I is the main body of the manipulator and is made of
Ecoflex 00-30 silicone rubber [16] which is a very soft and
biocompatible material. Part II establishes the top of the
manipulator and is made of Dragonskin 30 silicone rubber [17]
which has higher stiffness than Ecoflex 00-30. The role of
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using a stiffer material at the top is to prevent top surface from
bulging as the air is pressurized inside the fluidic chambers.
The top surface has to be flat during the application of the
pressurized air. Since the top surface center will be considered
as the origin of the frame attached to the manipulator end-
effector, its location w.r.t. the top surface must remain fixed.
This issue is of great importance because the sensory feedback
requires no deformation at the top surface upon actuation.
The manipulator has a cylindrical shape with a diameter of
25 mm and a total length of 70 mm as depicted in Fig. 1. The
three fiber-reinforced FFAs have outer diameter of 8 mm and
inner diameter of 4 mm. The normal distance between each
FFA’s outer wall and the nearest manipulator’s outer surface is
1.75 mm. A helical single fiber of 0.36 mm diameter is wound
around each FFA at a tight pitch, whereas each turn touches its
predecessor. The reinforcement fibers are typical nylon knitting
threads. These fibers prevent each FFA from radial expansion
and the result is elongation upon air actuation. The elongation of
one FFA causes a bending motion of the whole manipulator.
Since the manipulator has three FFAs, it can accomplish
omnidirectional bending and/or elongation. The fixed base
coordinate system is selected whereas the x-axis passes through
the center point of FFA1 as shown in Fig. 1.
III. MATERIAL CHARACTERIZATION AND FABRICATION
A. Material Modeling
The soft surgical manipulator is fabricated using
Ecoflex 00-30 silicone rubber and Dragonskin 30. These
materials undergo stress-strain behavior of hyperelastic
materials. Assessing the mechanical characteristics of these
materials has been previously carried out in [13]. The third-
order Yeoh model was proved to be the best constitutive
model for Ecoflex 00-30, while the second-order Yeoh model
was the best constitutive model for Dragonskin 30. The nth
order Yeoh material model is represented by (1), where U is
the strain energy potential, I1 is the first deviatoric strain
invariant and Ci0 is a material specific parameter. For Ecoflex
00-30, the material model parameters were determined to be:
C10 = 5072 J·m-3, C20 = –331 J·m-3, C30 = –15 J·m-3, and
N = 3. For Dragonskin 30, the material model parameters were
determined to be: C10 = 1190 J·m-3, C20 = 23028 J·m-3, and
N = 2.
(1)
B. Soft Robot Fabrication
The fabrication process of the soft manipulator is
conducted through subsequent steps of casting as shown in
Fig. 2. Both Ecoflex 00-30 and Dragonskin 30 come into two
parts A and B [16, 17]. Each material’s part A and part B are
to be mixed together at a volumetric ratio of 1:1. After mixing
the two parts, air bubbles are formed inside the mixture. These
air bubbles have to be removed in order to attain good
mechanical properties of the silicone rubber. The mixture
should be introduced into a vacuum chamber at around –0.9
bar to dispose all the entrapped air bubbles. After that, the
mixture is poured carefully to the mold and left to be cured.
Curing times for Ecoflex 00-30 and Dragonsking 30 are 4 and
16 hours, respectively.
The fabrication process begins with wrapping a helical
fiber around three 8 mm rods at a close pitch. The three rods
are then inserted in the mold (Fig. 2a) for the first silicone
casting process. A mixture of Ecoflex 00-30 parts A and B is
prepared in a cup, degassed in a vacuum, and then poured
gently into the mold. After pouring is completed, the mold is
put in a vacuum again to remove any air bubbles that may have
been formed during the pouring step. The cast silicone is then
left for full curing (Fig. 2b) at room temperature. Up to this
stage, the main body of the soft manipulator enclosing fibers is
formed. Once curing is completed, the three 8 mm rods are
taken away very gently so as not to deteriorate the cured
silicone, nor the fibers. Then, three 4 mm rods are inserted in
the mold retaining the cured silicone rubber (Fig. 2c). An
additional Ecoflex 00-30 layer is injected between the rods and the
cured silicone (Fig. 2d) and left for curing. After that, the three rod
are pushed down slowly until their top surfaces touch the cured
silicone top surface. A thick layer of Dragonskin 30 is then poured
to the mold top (Fig. 2e). Eventually, the soft manipulator is
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demolded, sealed at bottom, and thin latex tubes are
introduced to manipulator base (Fig. 2f). These tubes are the
means through which air is pressurized into each FFA.
V. FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS
This section describes the finite element analysis (FEA)
procedure using ANSYS software. Fig. 3 shows the manipulator
environment. The manipulator assembly (Fig. 3a) is composed
of eight parts (Fig. 3b to Fig. 3e). The inner tubes (Fig. 3b) are
fitted inside the manipulator’s body (Fig. 3d) with helical
fibers (Fig. 3c) in between. After that, the manipulator’s top
part is mated over the manipulator’s body. Inner tubes,
manipulator’s body, and manipulator’s top part are modeled as
solid bodies. They are meshed with SOLID186 element type
which has quadratic displacement behavior and mixed u-p
formulation for simulating incompressible hyperelastic
materials. Helical fibers are modeled as beams with
BEAM188 element type.
The mesh sizes are globally selected as 2 mm for
manipulator’s body and top part, 1.5 mm for inner tubes, and
1 mm for helical fibers. The solid bodies are meshed with a
congruent mesh, whereas all neighboring nodes from different
parts are merged. This results in enhanced performance, fast
convergence, and lower computation times. Displacement
constrictions are induced between the helical fibers and the
outer surfaces of inner tubes. These constrictions are
introduced by using constraint equation interfaces between
pairs of nearby helical fibers nodes and inner tubes meshing
elements.
The whole manipulator assembly is set fixed at its bottom
surface. Air pressure is applied to the inner surface of inner
tubes and the bottom surface of manipulator’s top part that faces
the inner tubes. The transient structural module is used for
dynamic simulation in ANSYS workbench. Material densities
are 1070 kg/m3 for Ecoflex 00-30, 1080 kg/m3 for Dragonskin
30 and 1150 kg/m3 for nylon fibers. Helical fibers are modeled
using linear isotropic elasticity with E = 3.5 GPa and ν = 0.25.

V. EXPERIMENTAL WORK
This section establishes for the experimental assessment of
the soft manipulator dynamic performance versus the
numerical simulations using transient FEA. After completing
the fabrication process, the soft manipulator is connected to a
fixed based and held in a setup for conducting experiments.
A. System Setup
The experimental setup is shown in Fig. 4. It consists of five
main subsystems: air compressor, solenoid valves, pressure
sensors, control circuitry, and visual motion tracking. The
Arduino Mega 2560 board is used for interfacing different
subsystems to the host PC through USB communication. Three
pairs of normally closed 2/2 solenoid valves are employed for
controlling the air pressure inside each FFA. Each pair is
targeted at one FFA, whereas one valve delivers the pressurized
air and the other evacuates the entrapped air upon actuation.
Pressure control signals are sent from the host PC through
Arduino board to the MOSFET amplifier circuit to
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drive the solenoid valves accordingly.
In order to track the manipulator’s motion, a fiducial marker
is glued to its top. This marker is then detected from a captured
image taken by a camera at a resolution of 1280×960. The
marker detection is carried out using Aruco library [18] which is
implemented in C++ based on OpenCV library. After detecting
the fiducial marker, its pose is estimated accordingly. This
requires camera calibration procedure beforehand. Both pressure
sensors readings, marker detection, and pose estimation are
synchronously acquired to the host PC. As pressure control
signals are sent from the PC to the Arduino board, the solenoids
are actuated and pressure sensors record the instantaneous air
pressure inside each FFA. The pressure sensors measured data
are saved in order to be used later in finite element simulations.
Two coordinate frames are attached to the manipulator as
depicted in Fig. 4. The first one is fixed to the center of the
manipulator’s base and is denoted by {X0, Y0, Z0}. The second
one is congruent to the center of the manipulator’s top face and
is denoted by {X1, Y1, Z1}. During experiments, the coordinate
frame {0} remains fixed, while the coordinate frame {1} moves
with the manipulator’s top face.
B. Transient Response of One Actuated FFA
In this experiment, air is actuated though FFA1 using
solenoids 1 and 2. Fig. 5 shows the input pressure as a function
of time. Fig. 6 gives X, Y, and Z components as well as the total
displacement of experimental and FEA responses. That figure
shows good agreement between FEA and experimental data for
the soft manipulator. The minimum difference of total
displacement is 2 mm. This represents 3% of the manipulator’s
original length and occurs when the instantaneous pressure is
almost constant (between 1.1 s and 1.6 s). The maximum
difference of total displacement is 10 mm (14%), which happens
at rapid pressure changes. Fig. 7 shows the shapes of the soft
manipulator at two different static pressures, namely 0.5 and 1
bar, for both experimental study and finite element simulation.
That figure proves shape similarity of the soft manipulator for
both experimental and finite element results.
Fig. 5 Input pressure as a function of time.
C. Transient Response of Two Actuated FFAs
In this experiment, air is actuated though FFA1 and FFA2
using solenoids 1, 2, 3, and 4. The air pressure is the same as
shown in Fig. 5. Fig. 8 depicts X, Y, and Z components as well
as the total displacement of the experimental and FEA
 Fig. 6 Transient response for one actuated FFA. Fig. 8 Transient response for two actuated FFAs.

P = 0.5 bar P = 0.5 bar

P = 1.0 bar P = 1.0 bar

Fig. 7 Shape of one actuated FFA at two pressures (0.5 and 1.0 bar) versus Fig. 9 Shape of two actuated FFAs at two pressures (0.5 and 1.0 bar) versus
finite element simulation. finite element simulation.

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responses. The minimum difference of total displacement is
3 mm (4%), while the maximum difference is 13 mm (19%).
Fig. 9 demonstrates close resemblance between shapes of the
soft manipulator for both experimental and finite element
results at two different pressures.
VI. CONCLUSION
This paper introduces a transient FEA based tool for
designing soft surgical manipulator. The soft manipulator
design, fabrication process, and finite element modeling are
presented. An experimental setup has been built to test the
proposed methodology. Pressure sensors are used to measure
the pressure inside flexible fluidic actuators and transfer them
to FEA as input loads. Vision tracking system is employed to
record the manipulator trajectory. Comparing finite element
results with experimental results shows that the estimated
difference between them in the total displacement ranges from
4%, at nearly constant pressure, to 19% at high transient
pressure conditions. The agreement between transient FEA
response and experimental system response indicates that the
suggested methodology can predict well the system response.
Hence, it can be used for checking the design of new soft
robots without the need to build them in advance. Future work
will focus on using the proposed methodology in designing
and controlling of new soft robots to show its effectiveness in
reducing the development period.
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[17] https://www.smooth-on.com/products/dragon-skin-30/
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The first author is supported by a scholarship from the
Mission Department, Ministry of Higher Education of the
Government of Egypt which is appreciatively acknowledged.
The authors would like to thank the Egypt-Japan University of
Science and Technology (E-JUST) for providing the required
materials and equipment to carry out this research work.

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