Dexterous, compact telesurgical robot: thoat & airways

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Telesurgical "master/slave" robots have demonstrated significant potential to enhance surgeons' ability to perform delicate and dexterous minimally-invasive surgery (MIS) in cardiac, abdominal, prostate, and other surgical specialties. Despite these developments, current robotic instruments are still too large and/or have insufficient dexterity for surgical domains such as throat and airway surgery, which require highly dexterous, two handed manipulation in very confined spaces. The long-term goal of the proposed exploratory bioengineering research project is to develop a new class of modular, scalable surgical robots and to evaluate the potential of such systems to expand the scope of minimally-invasive surgical approaches to procedures requiring high precision and dexterity in such spaces. Our Specific Aims are as follows: 1) Develop a very compact, precise, and high-dexterity surgical "slave" robot suitable for minimally invasive surgery of the throat and airways; 2) Integrate this robot with an existing master controller to create a prototype telesurgical system; 3) Evaluate the performance of this system for suturing and tissue manipulation tasks on phantoms representing the constraints and environment of laryngeal surgery. Our proposed surgical robot employs very compact, novel 10 degree-of-freedom (DOF) arms, each consisting of a small 4 DOF "tool manipulation unit" mounted outside the patient, manipulating a 4 mm diameter "distal dexterity unit" (DDU) extending into the patient's body. Each DDU has a 2 DOF snake-like tip, at the end of which is a tiny 3 DOF parallel-link manipulation stage for added dexterity, manipulating a small gripper or other tool. The DDU uses flexible superelastic materials and a novel push-pull actuation scheme to provide precise manipulation with sufficient strength for tasks like suturing. Since this design does not require pivot joints, cables, or similar elements, it promises to be manufacturable and scalable to even smaller sizes. We will construct a 2-armed "slave" robot using this design. We will integrate this robot with one of several available master controllers and software in our laboratory. We will evaluate the combined system in comparison to hand-held instruments with suitable phantoms on groups of novice and experienced surgeons.