A Portable Surgeon’s Habits-based Master Manipulator for Vascular Interventional Surgery Robots

The emergence of vascular interventional surgery robot (VISR) has brought good news to patients. However, the current research on the master manipulator is still in its infancy. Nowadays, the shortcomings of the developed master manipulator include poor portability, lack of tactile feedback devices, not in line with surgeon’s operating habits and so on. In order to solve the above problems, a novel master manipulator is proposed in this paper. In order to realize the linear displacement measurement of the operating handle, a linear displacement measurement (LDM) unit based on rollers was proposed. By using the brushed DC motor and the bevel gears, the angular displacement measurement (ADM) unit and the circumferential force feedback (CFF) unit were designed. The decoupling of the operating rod and the rotating rod facilitated the portability of the proposed manipulator. Evaluation experimental results showed that the maximum linear error of the master manipulator was 0.296mm and the maximum angular displacement error was 7.66 degrees, which is acceptable. Moreover, the mathematical relationship between the circumferential force generated by the CFF and the input current was also obtained. To sum up, compared with other master manipulators, the proposed master manipulator is shown to be better and more promising.