Li, Zhi (University of California, Santa Cruz), Glozman, Daniel (University of California Santa Cruz), Milutinovic, Dejan (Baskin School of Engineering, UC Santa Cruz), Rosen, Jacob (University of California at Santa Cruz)

Maximizing Dexterous Workspace and Optimal Port Placement of a Multi-Arm Surgical Robot

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Sessions "Medical Robots II" (WeA213), Wednesday, May 11, 2011, 11:05−11:20, Room 5I

2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 9-13, 2011, Shanghai International Conference Center, Shanghai, China

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on December 10, 2019

Abstract

A surgical procedure is traditionally performed by at least two surgeons along with staff nurses. One surgeon serves as the primary surgeon and the other serves as his/her assistant. Surgical robotics redefined the dynamics in which the two surgeons interact with the surgical site. Raven IV is a new generation of surgical robot system with four articulated robotic arms, each of which is in spherical configuration and holds an articulated surgical tool. The system allows two surgeons to teleoperate the Raven IV collaboratively from two remote sites. This research effort aims to configure the link architecture of each robotic arm of Raven IV along with the position (port placement) and orientation of the Raven IV with respect to the patient, in order to optimize the common workspace reachable by all the four robotic arms. The simulation results indicate that tilting the base of the robotic arms in the range of -20 to 20 deg while moving the ports closer together up to 50 mm apart leads to a preferred circular shape of the common workspace with an the isotropy value of 0.5. A carefully specified configuration of a system with multiple surgical robotic arms will enhance the interactive performance of the two surgeons.