Design of a Novel Master-slave Robotic System for Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery: A Prototype Study

Robot-assisted Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES) minimizes surgical trauma by accessing body cavities through natural orifices, offering benefits such as reduced invasiveness, lower infection risk, and faster recovery times. However, the complexity of instrument flexibility and operational precision remains challenging in NOTES robotic systems. This paper introduces a novel cable-driven dual-arm robotic system for NOTES, featuring an innovative flexible arm design and an integrated master-slave teleoperation system. The design of the multi-DoF cable-driven robotic arm enhances the system’s flexibility, while the teleoperation system ensures precise control over the arm’s movement, maintaining stability and accuracy during operation. The system enables intuitive control and flexible operation, facilitating operator training and data collection for robot learning. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the cable-driven flexible arm and the teleoperation system, confirming the feasibility of the designed robotic system for NOTES procedures.