Development of a Tendon-Driven Robotic Tool Targeting Visual-Servoing Minimally-Invasive Surgical Operations

Abstract

The development and experimental evaluation of a prototype robotic surgical tool is presented in this article. Servo motors are used as actuators in a tendon-driven actuation mechanism. The 2 Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) manipulator is a cascade configuration of 2 rotational joint modules. Each DoF is actuated independently by the corresponding tendon pair in a pulley-driven configuration. The design, fabrication and kinematics of the tool are analyzed. Moreover, the efficiency of the overall system is investigated in experimental studies, utilizing two performance evaluation methods. The first is an IMU-based, whilst the second utilizes a monocular visual servoing setup.