Development and Experimental Evaluation of a 3DoF Tendon-Driven Probe for Robot Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgical Operations

Robotic surgery has been an upcoming scientific area for many years. However, several limitations have restricted the use of robotic surgery to a confined field of operations. In this context, the development and experimental evaluation of a novel prototype laparoscopic robotic surgical tool, that can expand the capabilities of the existing surgical robotic devices, is discussed in this article. Servo-motors are used as actuators in a tendon-driven actuation mechanism. The 3 Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) manipulator is a cascade configuration of three rotational joint modules, imitating the motions of a spherical wrist. The design, fabrication, and kinematics of the tool are presented, while the efficiency of the overall system is investigated through experimental studies, using an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensing modality as external reference.