A cable-driven highly compact single port laparoscopic surgical robot with sequentially inserted arms.

Background: The single port surgical robot causes only one incision and brings many benefits to patients. It is very challenging to design a single port surgical robot that causes a smaller incision than current products.
Methods: This paper presents a highly compact single port laparoscopy surgical robot, which makes full use of the space of the port and only needs a 15 mm-diameter port. The robot is composed of a camera manipulator and two operating manipulators. The non-fully cylindrical manipulators enter the port sequentially, and the equivalent diameter of each operating manipulator is 12 mm. An additional 9 mm-diameter channel is left for other surgical tools to pass through after all manipulators entering the port.
Results: The kinematics model of the robot is established, including detailed forward kinematics model and inverse kinematics solution based on geometric iteration method. The teleoperation experiment shows that the manipulator can complete the object-grasping, object-transfer and weight-lifting tasks.
Conclusions: The proposed single port surgical robot design concept can also be extended to the field of natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgical robots.
(© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)