Design and prototyping of a concentric wire-driven manipulator

Abstract

Objective - Minimally invasive surgery has been widely embraced due to its multitude benefits, especially less traumatic. The key to its success is the instruments' accessibility and manipulability inside the confined surgical space. This motivates researchers to develop flexible manipulators, which could bend inside the body cavity. Two representative flexible manipulators include the wire-driven manipulator (WDM) and the concentric tube manipulator (CTM) [1-2]. In general, WDMs excel in curvature control but the lengths of their bending sections are fixed. This limits their accessibility and manipulability [3-4]. In this work, we intend to improve these by a new design.