Al-Zahrawi: A Telesurgical Robotic System for Minimal Invasive Surgery

Surgical robots provide various advantages, such as improved precision and dexterity, over conventional surgical procedures and have been extensively studied in the last decade. Many surgical robots have been recently developed and described in the literature. However, given their multidisciplinary nature, due to the involvement of medical surgery, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and computer science, very few existing documents provide a system design perspective of a complete surgical robot. We tend to fill this gap by presenting the complete system-level design of Al-Zahrawi, which is a new telesurgical robotic system. The Al-Zahrawi system is mainly composed of two parts, i.e., a master console and a slave console, which are connected through a communication link. The master console consists of master manipulators (MMs), visual information presentation apparatus, and foot pedals. The slave console is primarily composed of three slave manipulators (SMs): The left and right manipulators are equipped with surgical instruments, whereas the middle one holds the endoscope. All the manipulators utilize the modified double parallelogram mechanism to achieve the remote center of motion. The distinguishing features of this system include: 1) a custom-made simple-in-construction user-friendly MMs; 2) a modular SM, with an interchangeable instrument module that does not contain any electronic circuitry and thus can be completely sterilized with ease; and 3) the availability of an independent forceps jaw movement, which increases the dexterity of the surgical tool tip without using the wrist mechanism.