Preliminary Design of a Reconfigurable Cable-Driven Parallel Haptic Device Towards Robot-Assisted Surgery

There still exist limitations in the current haptic device for robot-assisted surgery, such as complex structure and bulky size. To address the issues, this paper proposes a novel reconfigurable cable-driven parallel haptic device, consisting of three rods with vacuum chucks and six cables to achieve 5 degrees of freedom (DOFs). The reduced inertia/weight of the terminal and disturbance of the workspace are beneficial for dexterously operating. The rods as the frame can be fixed on the smooth surface freely to achieve the desired workspace with the help of vacuum chucks according to the surgical requirements. In this paper, the haptic device is presented in detail, including the mechanical design, the kinematic model, the workspace analysis, and the operation process. A simplified prototype is designed and fabricated. The experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the haptic device.