Control of a Magnetic Actuated Robotic Surgical camera system for single incision laparoscopic surgery

This paper demonstrates a Magnetic Actuated Robotic Surgical (MARS) camera system with two-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) orientation control for single incision laparoscopic surgery. The MARS camera design that consists of a stator and a rotor features a unified mechanism for anchoring, navigating, and rotating the insertable camera by externally generated rotational magnetic field from the stator. The insertable camera that has no on-board motors is capsulated in a one-piece housing with two ring-shaped tail-end magnets and one cylindrical central magnet as the rotor. The stator positioned outside an abdominal cavity consists of both permanent magnets and electromagnetic coils to generate rotational magnetic field. A closed-loop control system was developed to enable automatic fine orientation control of the MARS camera. The experimental investigations indicated that our MARS camera can achieve 0.67° and 0.49° control accuracies for tilt and pan motions respectively.