A Compact Two-armed Slave Manipulator for Minimally Invasive Surgery of the Throat

This paper presents the design, simulation and evaluation of a two-armed compact slave robot being designed for minimally invasive surgery of the throat. This robot has two robotic surgical arms equipped with novel distal dexterity units that use novel miniature snake-like devices. The hybrid kinematic structure of this slave robot includes closed and serial kinematic chains and snake-like devices. Jacobian formulation and redundancy resolution are presented together with a suturing simulation that evaluates the joint motions for a circular suture. The results demonstrate the capability of this robot to perform suturing inside a deep and confined surgical field such as the throat