Development of a parallel surgical robot with automatic bone drilling carriage for stereotactic neurosurgery

Abstract

Robot-assisted surgery is an active interdisciplinary field, which has applications in stereotactic neurosurgical operation, orthopedics surgery, and total knee replacements surgery etc. The conventional surgical robots are almost serial architectures, and the performances are restricted. This paper presents an ongoing research in developing a parallel surgical robot for precise skull drilling in stereotactic neurosurgical operations. We are currently developing a small occupancy surgical robot based on parallel mechanisms that has enough stiffness and accuracy. This surgical robot dimensions are 35/spl times/35/spl times/45 cm/sup 3/, and its weight is 6 kg. This surgical robot has six degree-of-freedom. The feed carnage of the bone drilling device, which has one translational degree of freedom, is mounted directly on the parallel surgical robot. The workspace of this parallel surgical robot based on the tip of drill is calculated. In pose control, we have designed a master to slave microcontroller-based fuzzy control system. The possibility of asymmetric workspace design is discussed.