Acrobot: a "hands-on" robot for total knee replacement surgery

A "hands-on" robotic system for total knee replacement (TKR) surgery is presented. A CT based pre-operative planning software is used to accurately plan the procedure. Intra-operatively, the surgeon guides a small special purpose robot, called Acrobot, which is mounted on a gross positioning device. The Acrobot uses active constraint control, which constrains the motion to a predefined region, and thus allows the surgeon to safely cut the knee bones to fit a TKR prosthesis with high precision. A noninvasive anatomical registration method is used. The system is currently undergoing clinical trials, and has been successfully used in 7 clinical trials with encouraging results.