A Soft Tissue Scalpel Cutting Robotic System with Sucker Fixation

Abstract

Soft tissue cutting is a fundamental operation in clinical treatments. Autonomous soft tissue cutting using scalpel, one of soft tissue cutting methods, is an emerging field. However, soft tissue displacement during cutting by robotic system is a bottleneck. In this paper, a robotic system is proposed with sucker that can fix soft tissue before and during cutting. The system consists of scalpel fixation and three degrees of freedom (DoF) motion structure and surrounding suckers at the bottom. Cutting curve is abstracted from the cut soft tissue imaged by X-ray. Then the curve is fitted using 10-order B-spline function. The experimental results provide a pilot study towards high precision soft tissue cutting robot.