Design of an integrated master-slave robotic system for minimally invasive surgery

Background: Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) robots are commonly used in hospitals and medical centres. However, currently available robotic systems are very complicated and huge, greatly raising system costs and the requirements of operating rooms. These disadvantages have become the major impediments to the expansion of MIS robots.

Methods: An integrated MIS robotic system is proposed based on the analysis of advantages and disadvantages of different MIS robots. In the proposed system, the master manipulators, slave manipulators, image display device and control system have been designed as a whole. Modular design is adopted for the control system for easy maintenance and upgrade. The kinematic relations between the master and the slave are also investigated and embedded in software to realize intuitive movements of hand and instrument. Finally, animal experiments were designed to test the effectiveness of the robot.

Results: The robot realizes natural hand-eye movements between the master and the slave to facilitate MIS operations. The experimental results show that the robot can realize similar functions to those of current commercialized robots.

Conclusions: The integrated design simplifies the robotic system and facilitates use of the robot. Compared with the commercialized robots, the proposed MIS robot achieves similar functions and features but with a smaller size and less weight.