Design Process of a New Lighting Robotic Arm for Operating Room

Abstract

In this paper, we present the design process followed to conceive a lighting robotic arm dedicated to operating rooms. During a surgical procedure, the use of a high quality lighting system is essential to the successful completion of the surgical task. Indeed, the intensity and incidence of the light projection must be controlled according to the surgeon needs. However, surgeons cannot directly manipulate the lighting dome by hand because of aseptic reasons. First of all, we present the medical specifications used to define the technological and robotic needs, provided from real experiments and observations in operating room. Then, a complete topological synthesis has been applied to choose the most adequate kinematic solution. A kinematic simulator, as well as a prototype, have been developed to validate the effectiveness of the selected solution. Finally, we propose the use of a dynamic analysis, based on a Newton-Euler algorithm, to correctly choose the joint actuators.