Design and Kinematic Analysis of a 6-DoF Parallel Robot for Image-Guided Surgery

Image-guided robot based on medical imaging is extensively utilized in the field of surgery due to its inherent characteristics of enhanced precision and larger accessible workspace than surgeons, resulting in reduced harm to patients. Nevertheless, the robots currently employed in image-guided surgery are either insufficiently stable serial robots or parallel robots that pose difficulties in computing direct kinematics. As an improvement to current robot-assisted surgical systems, a compact six degrees of freedom (DoF) decoupled parallel robot has been proposed and corresponding kinematic model has been established. Furthermore, an algorithm based on Newton iterative method is employed to solve the forward kinematics problem. Finally, simulated neurosurgical experiments are carried out to display the trajectory of motion planning and to verify the correctness of kinematics. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed parallel robot can achieve satisfactory performance.