Design and Evaluation of a Dexterous and Modular Hand-Held Surgical Robot for Minimally Invasive Surgery

Current surgical instruments with fewer degrees-of-freedom (DOF) for minimally invasive surgery (MIS) have limited capability to perform complicated and precise procedures, such as suturing and knot-tying. To address such a problem, a modular dexterous hand-held surgical robot with an ergonomic handle and 4DOF interchangeable instruments was developed. The kinematic arrangement of the instrument and that of the handle were designed to be the same. A compact roll-yaw-roll transmission was proposed applying cable-driven mechanism. Performance experiments were carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the overall system. The measured grip forces of the robot ranged from 8.63N to 19.18N. The suturing performance score of the robot was significantly higher than that of the conventional instrument (28.8 +/- 5.02 versus 17.2 +/- 7.43, p=0.041). The trajectory tracking test and animal experiment verified the accuracy and feasibility of the robot. The proposed robot could improve the surgical performance of MIS, providing various end-effectors and having an intuitive interface in the meantime.