Configurability Selection of Robotic Arm with Constrained Task and Environment in Laparoscopic Hysterectomy for Uterus Manipulation

Multi-link serial robots have gained growing popularity in robot-assisted surgeries with the advantages of flexibility and versatility. This type of robot has be introduced into the uterus manipulation in laparoscopic hysterectomy (UMLH) to mitigate the disadvantages of our previous robotic uterus manipulator. Compared with the other surgical tasks (e.g. laparoscope manipulation, orthopedic and neurosurgery surgeries), the UMLH has a more narrow workspace and a stringent task requirement. Selecting the proper initial configuration of the robot is a key issue for such kind of surgical operations. In this paper, we develop a scheme to select appropriate initial configurations for the UMLH. Moreover, our method can satisfy both the static RCM and dynamic RCM. In an dynamic RCM, the task path or trajectory depends on the robot initial pose and arbitrary (or indefinite) with respect to the robot base frame. We also proposed a criterion, i.e. configuration-type task capability (CTTC), to measure the task capability of a given configuration-type for the dynamic RCMs. Simulations are carried out to validate our scheme.