Study on wrist mechanism of articulated forceps for robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery

Abstract

Laparoscopic surgery is a minimally invasive surgery that accelerates postoperative recovery, but it can only be performed by surgeons with advanced surgical skills. One of the main difficulties in laparoscopic surgery is restriction of free motion of the forceps because of limited degrees of freedom by the trocar. Recently, many master-slave manipulators with articulated forceps have been used in laparoscopic surgery to solve this problem. It is important to develop a wrist mechanism of the articulated forceps for robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery. In this paper, a new wrist mechanism of an articulated forceps using wires and pulleys is proposed. Features of this wrist mechanism are small offset between the pitch axis and the yaw axis, standard working posture of wrist mechanism far from singular configuration, simple and stiffness structure. The effectiveness of the mechanism is shown through evaluation data of a proto type.