This paper describes an advanced tool guiding system for robot assisted surgery. It is offering two additional local degrees of freedom to a standard robotic tool guiding system like of the Zeus robotic surgery system. The tool guide is basically a tube that guides the inserted surgical instrument to the desired location. By adding two bending degrees of freedom at the tip, the developed system largely increases the maneuverability of the instrument. It consists of a micromachined superelastic tube driven by a conventional cable system. Main issue was the design of a flexible hinge system in superelastic NiTi that offers the desired bending angles (at least 90 degrees in both directions) and that is compatible with the material limits for long-time cycling. Based on extended FE calculations and experimental measurements the second-generation design offers 90 degrees bending in both directions. The improvement over previous devices is the combination of two degrees of freedom with a small diameter of only 5 mm. An additional advantage is the tool channel, which enables the use of different instruments with this single device.

The aim of this research is to apply a laparoscopic robot to improve and facilitate the procedures of laser laparoscopy performed by gynecological surgeons. We took advantages of the existing laparoscopic robot and made digitizer tablet and wireless pen as intuitive interface for this particular purpose. The What-You-Draw-is-What-You-Cut (WYDIWYC) control scheme provide surgeons a natural interface to perform laser ablation as he is sketching by pen. The auto-focus functionality helps surgeons to focus the laser automatically by an laparoscopic distance sensor. Some safety measures are installed in DSP controller. The accuracy of the robot is examined by a sinusoidal test and is more than the demand in laser laparoscopy. The simplicity of usage of the intuitive writing interface is demonstrated by a volunteer and shows the excellent results by cutting on an apple. Some considerations for safety issues are discussed in this paper.