A modular and reconfigurable mini-robotic system with 5 degrees of freedom (DoFs) towards minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is developed in this project. The mini-robotic system consists of two modules, a 2-DoFs rotational end-effector based on a spring-spherical joint mechanism, and a 3-DoFs positioning platform based on the linear Delta parallel mechanism. Magnetic spherical joints are adopted to replace the traditional spherical joint. The magnetic joint connection enables fast and easy assembling of the end platform and kinematic chain, which brings great potential of installing different surgical instruments during surgery. The system is composed of a master teleoperator and a slave teleoperator. They are in the same kinematics configuration so the manipulator’s control is intuitive due to the bilateral isokinematic mapping.
Magnetically-Connected Modular Reconfigurable Robots
Researchers
Introduction
The Main Impact
In this project, a modular and reconfigurable mini-robotic system based on magnetic spherical joints is proposed for minimally invasive surgery (MIS). Linear Delta mechanism is adopted as a 3 degrees of freedom (DoFs) positioning platform. The traditional spherical joints in the linear Delta mechanism are replaced with magnetic spherical joints. Hence the end platform and the kinematic chains of the 3-DoFs positioning platform can be fastly assembled and disassembled. Based on this characteristic, different instruments can be quickly deployed during the surgery. Besides, flexible shaft transmission is introduced to make the system as compact as possible. The outer diameter of the current prototype is 32.5mm.
The advantages of the proposed system can be summarised as (1) characteristics such as wide range of motion, no clearance, and fast assemble and disassemble obtained by using magnetic spherical joint which brings bright potential to assemble multiple instruments during surgery; (2) low-cost isomorphic master-slave system that can be quickly built by modular parallel mechanisms with basic components bringing high control capability for surgeons; and (3) compact size (outer diameter of 32.5mm) with a large workspace (9.97x10〖mm〗^3) and high accuracy (3 axes positioning error of 1.2mm).
System overview
Cadaver test
Different application scenarios