System Design of A Dual-Arm Surgical Robot for Single Port Access Surgery

Single port access surgery (SPAS) attract much attention by taking potential advantages of fewer incisions and cosmetic therapeutic effects. Compared with multi-keyholes minimally invasive surgery (MIS), SPAS could fit through a single incision to deploy instruments for tissue manipulation. Robotic assistance SPAS is in great interest via improved precision, flexible manipulation and computer assisted. In order to perform smoothly in SPAS, dexterous surgical instruments are in urgent needs. This paper presents a surgical robot with dual arms configuration, with six degrees of freedom (DOFs) for each. The workspace of the dual-arm configuration is analyzed based on the kinematics of the orthogonal rotation joint of the surgical manipulator is calculated by using screw theory. The position accuracy experiment is performed based on the kinematical computation, and the results are promising for tissue surgical intervention. The preliminary experiment of tele-controlling the surgical manipulator for example ring transfer tasks points a way of performing SPAS by the existing designs.