Trajectory Planning of Knot-Tying Manipulation in Surgery

摘要

Due to demands for stability, accuracy and lower postoperative complication in surgery, robotic surgical assistants may assist surgeons by performing specific subtasks such as suturing and knot-tying to reduce surgeon tedium and duration of some exhausting operations. To improve the surgical knot quality and accelerate healing for patients in surgery, trajectory planning of suture clamping point in knot-tying manipulation using a master-slave robot is discussed based on the surgeon’s manual motion of knot-tying. First, the manual knot-tying process is described, and then according to task sequences, trajectories planning of suture clamping point in looping step based on motion synthesis of rotating joint and swinging joint and pulling step based on slip knot theory are proposed separately to form a knot. To verify the reasonability of trajectory planning, knot-tying motion is simulated by Solidworks. And finally the knot-tying experiment is implemented on the specific robotic setup. The results show that the proposed trajectory planning of knot-tying is feasible in the automation of surgical knot-tying manipulation.