A skull-mounted robotic headframe for a neurosurgical robot

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a skull-mounted robotic headframe for intracranial neurosurgery. The headframe is primarily comprised of a pedestal, a Stewart platform, and a linear actuation module interfacing with a mesoscale neurosurgical robot. In addition to kinematic modeling, motion planning is carried out for neurosurgical procedures using the headframe. Due to the symmetric neurosurgical robot and the insertion and retraction motion of the linear actuation module, the headframe includes kinematic redundancy and it is utilized to enhance the positioning accuracy of the system. In this paper, several simulations are conducted to evaluate the headframe workspace, followed by an experimental study of the positioning error of the neurosurgical robot and a proof-of-concept demonstration of the headframe interfacing with the neurosurgical robot.