Active cannula robot with misorientation auto-recovery camera: A method to improve hand-eye coordination in minimally invasive surgery

We develop a kind of active cannula robot (microsurgery system) used in minimally invasive surgery. This robot mainly consists of two parts: active cannula and control unit. The active cannula is composed of two or three concentric pre-curved elastic tubes that can be translated and rotated relative to one another. Each tube is driven by a motor with a decelerator. Elastic interaction is caused as tubes are translated and rotated relatively, which reshape the cannula to bypass the barriers. In addition, vision system is also integrated into our system. However, when the micro-camera fastened to the tip of cannula rotates together with the active cannula, the orientation of object presented on the monitor is always changing, which will complicate manual dexterity among surgeons. To solve this problem, we design a real-time misorientation auto-recovery algorithm for calibrating the rotation angle and confirm it by experiment.