This paper presents the task specifications for designing a novel Insertable Robotic Effectors Platform (IREP) with integrated stereo vision and surgical intervention tools for Single Port Access Surgery (SPAS). This design provides a compact deployable mechanical architecture that may be inserted through a single Ø15 mm access port. Dexterous surgical intervention and stereo vision are achieved via the use of two snake-like continuum robots and two controllable CCD cameras. Simulations and dexterity evaluation of our proposed design are compared to several design alternatives with different kinematic arrangements. Results of these simulations show that dexterity is improved by using an independent revolute joint at the tip of a continuum robot instead of achieving distal rotation by transmission of rotation about the backbone of the continuum robot. Further, it is shown that designs with two robotic continuum robots as surgical arms have diminished dexterity if the bases of these arms are close to each other. This result justifies our design and points to ways of improving the performance of existing designs that use continuum robots as surgical arms.

This paper presents a novel design and preliminary kinematic analysis of an insertable robotic effector platform (IREP) for single port access (SPA) surgery. The IREP robot can be deployed into body cavity through a Ø15 mm skin incision to perform SPA procedures. It consists of two snake-like continuum robots as slave surgical assistants for tissue manipulation, two parallelogram mechanisms for the continuum robots' placement, and one controllable stereo vision module with integrated light source for depth perception and tool tracking. Design considerations and alternatives, calculations and preliminary simulations of this 17-DoF surgical robotic system are presented in this paper. The overall control system hierarchy for tele-manipulation using the IREP robot is also presented.

Needle steering is a commonly used technique in the medical field as it enables physicians to more precisely reach the target tissue. In this paper we describe our interest in needle steering for lung biopsy and the significance of this technique. There has been much interest in modeling needle steering in recent years and this paper builds upon that work. We describe our Matlab implementation and present simulation results. We also show our experimental results based on a robotic needle driver and X-Ray imaging in the interventional suite. The experimental results showed good agreement with the simulation results.

Robot-assisted surgical systems can be used to extend the capabilities of surgeons. A number of surgical robots have been successfully utilized in several surgical applications. This paper presents our recent work on the design of a robot-assisted, laryngeal surgical system. The system works in a master-slave operation mode. PHANToM Desktop devices are used as the master of the system. The slave of this system, which has dual arms, is designed and optimized to perform laryngeal surgeries with high precision and dexterity. The results of animal experiments show that it is possible to apply the system to perform minimally invasive throat surgery through a laryngoscope

A robotic system with force feedback for micro-surgery is developed (named “Microhand”). The system designed is based on a master-slave operation mode. The slave manipulators are designed by using macro-micro frames. The PHANToM Desktop developed by the SensaAble Technology Company is used as the master device. The interactive force/torque information of the slave manipulators and the surgical environments measured by the six-dimension force/torque sensors are fed back to the master device, so that the system is capable of providing force feedback to the surgeon during operations. The validity of the system has been proved through animal experiments of vas suturing a rabbit’s 3mm in diameter neck artery and its 1mm in diameter leg artery.