On the development of a portable, cost effective and compact master/slave system for robot-assistec Minimally Invasive Surgery

Abstract

Tele-operation systems offer more security and comfort to the surgeon in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS). This paper presents a new tele-operation system for MIS. This system was designed to be efficient, portable, compact and affordable. The developments of master and slave robots of the teleoperation system are presented. Some issues encountered in the development of these robots are studied here. The main issues are as follows: the presence of the singularities in the workspace of the master robot, the complexity of the master forward kinematic model due to its parallel structure and the difference between the kinematics of the master and the slave robots. Those issues are solved using different techniques which are presented in this paper. Finally, experimental validations of the developed teleoperation system were carried out successfully.