Design and Analysis of a Micro Flexible Surgical Robot

Continuum robots have been widely used in the medical field due to their flexibility. In order to further expand the application range of continuum robots in the medical field and meet the requirements of minimally invasive surgery, this paper proposes a micro flexible surgical robot. It is equipped with the tendon-driven actuation system and an elastic skeleton, which is made by laser cutting from Nitinol tube. The flexible robot skeleton and the guiding disk are processed in an integrated way to minimize the assembly error. It contains a central instrument channel and is easy to expand into multiple segments to adapt to complex operational requirements. First, the kinematic analysis is carried out. On this basis, a kinematics simplified method and a real-time monitoring method of the robot state are proposed. Then the static model of the system is established to analyze the relationship between the bending shape and the driving force. The researched robot can be used for the surgery in nasal cavity, transurethral surgery and the surgery of other narrow area, and has the potential to improve the efficiency and safety of the surgery.