Surgical Robotics

• Surgical robots overcome the limitations of traditional manual surgery by offering benefits such as motion scaling, motion filtering, added dexterity, and a greater range of kinematic motion.  Surgical systems like the Da Vinci have been widely employed across a variety of specialties, including urology, gynecology, general surgery, and cardiac surgery.

• However, most surgical robots use rigid surgical instruments, which restrict the use of surgical robots to directly accessible lesions.  Flexible robots, in contrast, provide improved accessibility and overcome the limitations of rigid robots.

• We are researching flexible, miniaturized surgical robots similar to flexible endoscope. These robots can navigate curved paths to perform precise tasks like dissection, hemostasis, and suturing within confined spaces.  Our goal is to develop robots that pass through natural orifices like the mouth, vagina, or anus to perform complex procedures within the gastrointestinal tract, such as in the stomach or colon. These non-invasive surgical robots offer numerous clinical benefits by leaving no external wounds on the patient.

• In spit of these benefits, flexible surgical robots have technical challenges in designing miniaturized and flexible surgical joint mechanisms. Remote actuation makes it difficult for the robot to accurately position due to cabling effects introduced by cable elongation, friction and twisting.

• To overcome the technical limitations of the existing surgical robots, we are currently addressing the following issues:

-  How to minimize power transmission loss in flexible robots?

-  How to effectively model flexible power transmission mechanisms?  e.g. tendon-sheath

-  How to compensate for errors in flexible robots through control algorithms?

-  How to efficiently transmit power at steep curvatures and large bending angles?  e.g. retroflex posture

-  How to miniaturize robotic joints while maintaining sufficient payload?

-  How to assign/map a leader device into robotic arms and cameras for the operator to intuitive control?