Design and Control of a Tele-operated Soft Instrument in Minimally Invasive Surgery

Abstract

The medical sector has emphasised increasing levels of autonomy to achieve safe and efficient robot-assisted surgeries [1]. In this case, robust and intuitive manip- ulation of medical robots is crucial, and many tele- operated surgical robots have been developed, e.g., the da Vinci robotic platform. The tele-operation can of- fer high operation precision and intuitive manipulation. In addition, soft robots have led to the development of inherently safe and flexible interventional tools for medical applications, e.g, the minimally invasive surgery (MIS). Soft instruments are particular advantageous to navigate in tortuous anatomical environments with constrained space [2]. Combining the tele-operation technology with soft robots might further result in a significant reduction in operation time and increase of surgeons’ dexterity [3]. The contribution of this work lies in the design and control of a tele-operated soft instrument for laparoscopic examination are proposed based on the miniaturised STIFF-FLOP manipulators (with a diameter of 11.5 mm) [4]. Specifically, the robot has two serially connected modules, which can seamlessly fit to commercially available 12 mm trocar ports used in MIS (see Fig. 1). The bending angle of the soft instrument can achieve 180◦ . We also preliminarily validate the feasibility of the soft instrument.