Design of a Gough-Stewart Platform for micro-surgical operations

In general, optimal design for the mechanism such as Gough-Stewart Platform (GSP) does not take into account practical factors of the mechanism such as its component weight and size, and mechanical interferences among them, etc. Particularly, in designing a robot module for micro-surgical operations which would be mounted at the end of a macro manipulator, its light weight, compactness, as well as good kinematic performance are important design aspects that should be considered. In this paper, design of a compact GSP module incorporating additional practical design factors such as mechanical interferences among mechanism components is discussed. A modified design for micro-surgical operations which requires a small operation region represented as a nominal operation point is suggested and it is shown that its performance exceeds one of the typical GSP design under the given practical component limitations such as actual length of active prismatic joints.