Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : May 10, 2017 - May 13, 2017
To intuitively control arc-shaped surgical devices for pharyngeal cancer surgery, we proposed a 3-DOF mechanical motion conversion manipulator in our previous work. The manipulator converts the input translation of the handle to the rotation motion of an arc-shaped device. The rotation motion prevents the device from colliding with the oral and throat organs of the patient during insertion. The manipulator is inexpensive and has high reliability because it transforms motions only through mechanical links without using actuators. However, it cannot maintain its posture against the effect of the gravity in absence of actuators. This requires the operator to continuously hold onto the handle, which is not practical in the real surgery. In this paper we propose a simple design procedure to develop a weight compensator. We developed and applied the proposed weight compensator to our mechanical manipulator.
