Development of a New Medical Robot System for Minimally Invasive Surgery

This article presents the development of a new medical robot system comprising a spherical remote center motion (RCM) mechanism with modular design and two mechanical decoupling methods for Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS). We achieved excellent comprehensive performance indices through a novel multi-objective optimization model comprising four optimization objective functions, three constrained conditions and two optimization variables. In order to enhance the manipulability, remove the coupling between motors, and reduce the control difficulty, two new decoupling mechanism means were proposed to remove coupling motion between the wrist and pincers, coupling motion between the translational joint of mobile platform and four interface disks of surgical instrument as a results of rear drive motor, respectively. The control system architecture is designed to include intuitive motion control, incremental motion control, and proportional motion control. Master-slave attitude registration and surgical instrument replacement strategies improve the master-slave control efficiency. We tested the spherical RCM mechanism performance indices and developed two mechanical decoupling methods and a master-slave control algorithm. Our experimental test results validated that fixing point accuracy, the coupling motions, the positioning and repeated positioning accuracy of the MIS robot, and master-slave control algorithm meet the requirements of MIS. Successful animal experiments confirmed effectiveness of the novel MIS robot system.