Optimal Kinematic Design of a Robotic Platform for Intraocular Surgeries

One of the current application of robotics is for robotically assisted minimally invasive surgeries, such as vitreoretinal eye operations. This paper introduces a new robot with novel structure for eye surgeries that consists of a linear mechanism coupled to a parallelogram based remote center of motion mechanism capable of orienting surgical instrument about a fixed point. To couple the linear mechanism to the parallelogram mechanism there are some options. The goal of this paper is to determine an optimum kinematic structure for the robot, having different coupling configuration of linear mechanism and parallelogram. Considering dexterity and compactness criteria, a cost function is introduced for the optimization problem which is performed using multi-criteria genetic algorithm optimization method.