Evaluations of a novel robotics assisted surgery system —MicroHand A

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery is new and promising applications of robotics, which can enhance the dexterity, provide high accuracy and can´t be affected by the fatigue, tremor and so on. In this paper, a novel master-slave robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery system MicroHand A is introduced. The master-slave control system for MicroHand has been designed, which is modular and consists of three sets of single-board named programmable multi-axis controller (PMAC) and motor controllers. Each set includes a single-board PMAC and ten or seven motor controllers. MicroHand A system has been successfully carried out ring and bar experiment, suturing and knot tying experiment and gall bladder removal of the pigs under master-slave mode and endoscopic image. The experiment results show that the performance of MicroHand A system is ease of use, decreased operation time, less tremor and can provide adequate dexterity, smoother motion and better accuracy to implement difficult surgical procedures. However, there exists a small delay during slave tracking master trajectory. In the future, the controller will be optimized to improve control accuracy, response time and other control performance, etc.