Thin-diameter chopsticks robot for Laparoscopic Surgery

摘要

Surgical robot systems increase the operability and efficiency of laparoscopic surgery. Forceps manipulators with the diameter less than 3mm can drastically reduces the invasion to the patient, compared to those used in current robot systems with the diameter of 5mm or more. In this paper, we propose a novel surgical manipulation system with Φ3mm forceps. Instead of introducing costly grasping mechanisms, the proposed system consists of a pair of rods driven by two robotic forceps holders, so that they can synchronously grasp, move, and rotate objects, in manner of a chopstick. Five-DOF kinematic model is constructed, which includes three-DOF translational motion, a sliding motion, and a grasping motion. A master-slave system is constructed and the tracking performance of the controller is validated. We also experimentally confirmed that the proposed system can perform the block-transfer task, which is common in training of surgeons, and the block-rotation task.