Design of a novel passive endoscopic robot for sinus surgery

In order to overcome the disadvantages of traditional Functional Endoscopic Sinus Surgery (FESS), a novel passive endoscopic robot for sinus surgery is designed in this paper. This paper mainly focuses on the design of the prototype of a novel passive endoscopic robot and the lock methods of the passive joints. The design of the robot is divided into two parts-the position arm and the end-effector with an endoscope. A parallelogram based passive position arm is proposed and detailed analyzed then, and a three spherical joints based end-effector is proposed and detailed analyzed. Hereafter, different lock methods for joints are discussed and evaluated for both passive position arm and end-effector. For passive position arm, a gear-like lock mechanism is proposed and detailed analyzed, and a bladder-spring based lock mechanism is proposed for the end-effector. The mechanical model of bladder-spring based lock mechanism is derived to guide the detailed design of the prototype of the robot.