Robotics for Minimally Invasive Surgery: A Historical Review from the Perspective of Kinematics

Since the widespread introduction of laparoscopic cholecystectomy in late 1989, the minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has been rapidly developed and applied to many classes of traditional surgeries. Along with the germination of the first surgical robot in 1985, it was not until April 1991 that the first robotically-assisted MIS was clinically applied to patients in a minimally invasive prostate surgery. Therefore, this paper is devoted to reviewing the development of robotics from the perspective of kinematics in MIS during the past twenty years taking account of the kinematic structures of the manipulator design of the robots. An exclusively kinematic geometry, namely the "remote center-of-motion", for MIS is reviewed by which a classification of MIS robots is concluded.