Automated control of the laser welding process of heart valve scaffolds

Abstract

Using the electrospinning process the geometry of a heart valve is not replicable by just one manufacturing process. To produce heart valve scaffolds the heart valve leaflets and the vessel have to be produced in separated spinning processes. For the final product of a heart valve they have to be mated afterwards. In this work an already existing three-axes laser was enhanced to laser weld those scaffolds. The automation control software is based on the robot operating system (ROS). The mechatronically control is done by an Arduino Mega. A graphical user interface (GUI) is written with Python and Kivy.