STUDY ON ROBOTICS THAT SUPPORTS LAPAROSCOPIC SURGERY

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

We studied and developed robotic technology that assists laparoscopic surgery. The main focus was to develop active mechanisms that provide extra degrees of freedom inside the patient's body for laparoscopic surgery where a surgeon suffers from lack of degrees of freedom of endoscopic equipments such as forceps.The team of University of Tokyo developed an active forceps using Ti-Ni shape memory alloy pipes, one of which memorized a circular shape at a higher temperature and another had straight shape memory at a lower temperature. Water circulation method was employed where hot water and cold water are controlled by motored pumps. The team attained approximately 45 degrees of bending angle with the response time of 9 seconds. In addition, a master-slave robot system was designed and prototyped including AESOP 1000, Polhemus Sensor, and so on. The team also developed the concept of Motion Cancellation where a surgeon can execute operations on moving organs as if they were stationary.The Kagoshima University team explored another heating method that uses the Joule effect. Namely, the electric current goes through the SMA pipes and their resistance heats them up. Faster response is the advantage of this approach. The developed forceps attained approximately 40 degrees of bending angle with the response time of 3-4 seconds.