Robotic manipulators for single access surgery

This thesis explores the development of cooperative robotic manipulators for enhancing surgical precision and patient outcomes in single-access surgery and, specifically, Transanal Endoscopic Microsurgery (TEM). During these procedures, surgeons manipulate a heavy set of instruments via a mechanical clamp inserted in the patient’s body through a surgical port, resulting in imprecise movements, increased patient risks, and increased operating time. Therefore, an articulated robotic manipulator with passive joints is initially introduced, featuring built-in position and force sensors in each joint and electronic joint brakes for instant lock/release capability. The articulated manipulator concept is further improved with motorised joints, evolving into an active tool holder. The joints allow the incorporation of advanced robotic capabilities such as ultra-lightweight gravity compensation and hands-on kinematic reconfiguration, which can optimise the placement of the tool holder in the operating theatre. Due to the enhanced sensing capabilities, the application of the active robotic manipulator was further explored in conjunction with advanced image guidance approaches such as endomicroscopy. Recent advances in probe-based optical imaging such as confocal endomicroscopy is making inroads in clinical uses. However, the challenging manipulation of imaging probes hinders their practical adoption. Therefore, a combination of the fully cooperative robotic manipulator with a high-speed scanning endomicroscopy instrument is presented, simplifying the incorporation of optical biopsy techniques in routine surgical workflows. Finally, another embodiment of a cooperative robotic manipulator is presented as an input interface to control a highly-articulated robotic instrument for TEM. This master-slave interface alleviates the drawbacks of traditional master-slave devices, e.g., using clutching mechanics to compensate for the mismatch between slave and master workspaces, and the lack of intuitive manipulation feedback, e.g. joint limits, to the user. To address those drawbacks a joint-space robotic manipulator is proposed emulating the kinematic structure of the flexible robotic instrument under control.Open Acces

An Underactuated Flexible Instrument for Single Incision Laparoscopic Surgery

More and more patients and surgeons have switched from open surgery to minimally invasive surgery over these years. This exciting advancement has brought massive benefits to patients. Researchers and institutions have proposed robot assisted surgery which combines the advantage of developed robot system and human experience. This thesis reviews state of the art in this area and analyze some advanced surgical instrument for single incision laparoscopic instrument, then propose a design of robotic instrument for single incision laparoscopic surgery which can be integrated with collaborative robot manipulator to construct a surgical robot system.Single-incision laparoscopic surgery (SILS) has its own features and advantages compare to other minimally invasive surgery techniques which also lead to special design requirements for SILS instruments, among which increased flexibility compare to multi-incision surgery instruments is an important part. So we want to design a robotic surgical instrument that has increased flexibility compare to traditional instruments for other MIS techniques. As a laparoscopic robotic instrument compactness and light weight are also our considerations.Single incision laparoscopic surgery (SILS) inserts multiple instruments and laparoscopes through a single trocar which reduces trauma. But this improvement for patients caused difficulty in operation because of instruments triangulation, laparoscope field-of-view, etc. That brings up our challenges in designing a robotic instruments. Designing a highly flexible robotic instrument that provides sufficient workspace and good triangulation in order to relieve the difficulties introduced by narrow instrument trocars.We want to implement a highly recognized surgical instrument with a designed robotic instrument actuation pack. These two parts compose a robotic surgical instrument for single incision laparoscopic surgery. And we want to analyze the performance and viability of our design approach for SILS application

Design of a smart 3D-printed wristed robotic surgical instrument with embedded force sensing and modularity

This paper introduces the design and characterization of a robotic surgical instrument produced mainly with rapid prototyping techniques. Surgical robots have generally complex structures and have therefore an elevated cost. The proposed instrument was designed to incorporate minimal number of components to simplify the assembly process by leveraging the unique strength of rapid prototyping for producing complex, assemble-free components. The modularity, cost-effectiveness and fast manufacturing and assembly features offer the possibility of producing patient or task specific instruments. The proposed robot incorporates an integrated force measurement system, thus allowing the determination of the force exchanged between the instrument and the environment. Detailed experiments were performed to validate the functionality and force sensing capability of the instrument

Advances in Robot Kinematics : Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Advances in Robot Kinematics

International audienceThe motion of mechanisms, kinematics, is one of the most fundamental aspect of robot design, analysis and control but is also relevant to other scientific domains such as biome- chanics, molecular biology, . . . . The series of books on Advances in Robot Kinematics (ARK) report the latest achievement in this field. ARK has a long history as the first book was published in 1991 and since then new issues have been published every 2 years. Each book is the follow-up of a single-track symposium in which the participants exchange their results and opinions in a meeting that bring together the best of world’s researchers and scientists together with young students. Since 1992 the ARK symposia have come under the patronage of the International Federation for the Promotion of Machine Science-IFToMM.This book is the 13th in the series and is the result of peer-review process intended to select the newest and most original achievements in this field. For the first time the articles of this symposium will be published in a green open-access archive to favor free dissemination of the results. However the book will also be o↵ered as a on-demand printed book.The papers proposed in this book show that robot kinematics is an exciting domain with an immense number of research challenges that go well beyond the field of robotics.The last symposium related with this book was organized by the French National Re- search Institute in Computer Science and Control Theory (INRIA) in Grasse, France