Surgical Robot for Minimally Invasive Surgery using Pneumatic Servo Control

Abstract

In this paper, pneumatically-driven surgical assist robots for minimally invasive surgery (MIS) are introduced. The smooth and continuous movement needed for highly precise control of surgical robots have realized by pneumatic servo control. We mainly introduce two robots. One is the endoscope holder for MIS where the camera is held by robot arm that follows the operator's head movement. The other is a novel hand-held robotic forceps for MIS. Intuitive operation is realized by an active transformation from the surgeon's wrist-rotation to the tip-rotation using an inertia measurement unit. The effectiveness of the robots is confirmed with in-vitro and in-vivo experiments.