A Robotic System for Single-Site Access Laparoscopy Surgery: Design and Preliminary Experiments

This paper presents a new robotic system for single-site access laparoscopy surgery with 14 degrees of freedom (DoF). Two dexterous arms of the system can be operated for surgical processes through one incision. Each dexterous arm is designed as a hybrid mechanical architecture comprised of a multi-segment continuum robot, a parallelogram structure, and a distal dexterous instrument. The notched multi-segment continuum robot is designed as the main positioning mechanism, which can avoid collisions between surgical tools or arms and approach the surgical target more easily than a conventional straight surgical tool. The parallelogram structure is employed to support the continuum robot. For the 4-DoF dexterous instrument, the coupling problem between the yaw and pitch joints is addressed via a mechanical solution. Kinematics structure of the system and the forward kinematics of the continuum robot are presented. Kinematic simulation is implemented and preliminary experiments are performed with one prototypical arm of our proposed system.