Evaluations of a novel robotics assisted surgery system —MicroHand A

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery is new and promising applications of robotics, which can enhance the dexterity, provide high accuracy and can't be affected by the fatigue, tremor and so on. In this paper, a novel master-slave robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery system MicroHand A is introduced. The master-slave control system for MicroHand has been designed, which is modular and consists of three sets of single-board named programmable multi-axis controller (PMAC) and motor controllers. Each set includes a single-board PMAC and ten or seven motor controllers. MicroHand A system has been successfully carried out ring and bar experiment, suturing and knot tying experiment and gall bladder removal of the pigs under master-slave mode and endoscopic image. The experiment results show that the performance of MicroHand A system is ease of use, decreased operation time, less tremor and can provide adequate dexterity, smoother motion and better accuracy to implement difficult surgical procedures. However, there exists a small delay during slave tracking master trajectory. In the future, the controller will be optimized to improve control accuracy, response time and other control performance, etc.