Design and Development of a Robotic Uterine Manipulator for Gynecological Laparoscopy

Nowadays, surgical robots are widely used to perform surgeries more efficiently, especially in minimally invasive surgeries. This paper presents a novel robotic manipulator to substitute the second assistant doctor in gynecological laparoscopy. This enables the primary surgeon to perform uterine manipulation without additional human intervention. The developed manipulator has a serial kinematic configuration with five degrees of freedom (DOF) in order to reproduce all basic motions of the human assistant. Three parallel axis joints allow achieving a software-based remote center of motion (RCM) that coincides with the cervix of the patient. Furthermore, a set of intuitive hand gestures were defined through the Leap® Motion Controller (LMC) to control the manipulator allowing sterile and touch-less interaction. The gesture controller was implemented and tested in the CoppeliaSim virtual environment, whereas the developed prototype was tested for positioning accuracy in order to validate the concept. The developed robotic assistant is deemed a viable solution towards assistant-less solo gynecological laparoscopy.