抄録
The shortage of nurses in large hospitals of developed countries has become a major problem. Especially, the shortage of scrub nurses, who assist operating surgeons exchange surgical instruments, has been chronically severe. To compensate for this shortage, we have been proposing the Scrub Nurse Robot (SNR) system that is capable of functioning as a skilled human scrub nurse in endoscopic and laparoscopic surgery. We developed the SNR, and achieved smooth and cleverly movement of its arm with 6 D.O.F.. The SNR is able to insert the tip of instrument into a small-caliber trocar cannula penetrating a patient's abdominal wall. This function is named Automatic Instrument Inserting Function (AIIF) and it helps a surgeon to exchange instruments much faster than that in the real clinical operating room between a human scrub nurse and a surgeon. The AIIF is basically composed of a commercially-available 3D position measurement system and the algorithm that we developed to enable the arm to insert the instrument into the cannula instead of a surgeon. In this paper, we constructed two types of algorithm for AIIF, and verified which one is faster than the other one. The one algorithm controls 3 D.O.F. independently (IFC). And the other one is based on the kinematic analysis and control (KAFC). In the evaluation, we compared "targeting time" that was spent for inserting into trocar cannula. As the result, KAFC finished with an average of 0.46 sec faster than IFC (IFC: 3.13±0.63 sec (N=20)), (KAFC: 2.67±0.16 sec (N=20)). We figured out that latter algorithm is able to target faster and more stable. Therefore, what we can expect is, if this arm installed in the real clinical operating room, surgeons would concentrate on the operating procedures.
