Study on opportunity to use industrial manipulator in surgical-laparoscopic application

This paper presents study on opportunity to use industrial robot in surgical laparoscopic application. Described investigation was focused on searching the area in the manipulator task space where the volume of the manipulability ellipsoid in big enough to assure comfortable manipulation with laparoscope in the whole operation area. Deep study was necessary because laparoscope is a very special end-effector. It is very long and thus small changes of the orientation of tool-tip inside patient's body may require considerable position changes of the end of the manipulator. This is because that location of the operation area in the robot's task space must be chosen carefully to guarantee ability to change the orientation of the laparoscope in the whole desired range. This paper describes software tool that was created to make this choice easier.