Master manipulator designed for highly articulated robotic instruments in single access surgery

Abstract

The performance of a master-slave robotic system depends significantly on the ergonomics and the capability of its master device to correctly interface the user with the slave robot. Master manipulators generating commands in task space represent a commonly adopted solution for controlling a range of slave robots while retaining an ergonomic design. However, these devices present several drawbacks, such as requiring the use of clutching mechanics to compensate for the mismatch between slave and master workspaces, and the lack of capability to intuitively transmit important information such as specific joint limits to the user. In this paper, a novel joint-space master manipulator is presented. This manipulator emulates the kinematic structure of highly flexible surgical instruments which it is designed to control. This system uses 6 active degrees of freedom to compensate for its own weight, as well as to provide force feedback corresponding to the slave robot's joint limits. A force/torque sensor integrated at the end effector is used to relay user-generated forces and torques directly to specific joints. This is performed to counteract the friction stemming from structural constraints imposed by the kinematic design of the instruments. Finally, a usability study is carried out to test the validity of the system, proving that the instruments can be intuitively controlled even at the extremities of the workspace.

A highly intuitive and ergonomic redundant joint master device for four‐degrees of freedom flexible endoscopic surgery robot

“…Thus, the modified inverse condition number is calculated as where, is the joint limit considered Jacobian of the gripper. This Jacobian is calculated by penalizing the column vectors individually as follows: where is the i th column of the gripper and is a penalty function applied to the Jacobian 13 . This function is calculated as follows: where q i is the i th joint value; q i,min and q i,max are the lower and upper limit of the i th joint corresponding to the motion ranges of the wrist respectively; and κ q is a scaling coefficient, that specifies the functional shape.…”

“…This allows the surgeon to control the slave within safe limits, which is unlike a Cartesian space mapping method between the slave and master devices 12 . Wisanuvej et al 13 proposed a six‐DOFs master manipulator to manipulate a six‐DOFs surgical instrument for a single‐port robot system for transanal microsurgery. A joint mapping method considering the joint limit was proposed by using force feedback to solve the need for clutching and the lack of intuitive access.…”

Force/Velocity Manipulability Analysis for 3D Continuum Robots

“…Using this penalty function, the individual columns of J and C are penalized when the ith joint value q i approaches the limits q i,min or q i,max . This penalization approach has been used to contraint the robot Jacobian in [11], [22]. Now, by substituting the constrained Jacobian J c and compliance matrix C c in (4) and (10), we can calculate the VME, CME, and UME considering the robot's mechanical constraints.…”

Mechanism Design and Optimization of a Haptic Master Manipulator for Laparoscopic Surgical Robots

“…The parallel mechanism is designed to control 3 DOFs translational motion and the serial mechanism is a 4 DOFs quadruple-axial concurrent redundant mechanism designed to control three posture angles. Wisanuvej et al [24] presented a joint-space master manipulator for highly articulated robotic instruments in single access surgery. This serial-link manipulator emulates the kinematic structure of highly flexible surgical instruments which is designed to control and use 6 active DOFs to compensate for its own weight and provide force feedback.…”