Mechanism of a Learning Robot Manipulator for Laparoscopic Surgical Training

This paper presents a robot manipulator for hand-over-hand guidance training of laparoscopic surgery. Details of the mechanical design, kinematic analysis and control mechanism of the robot are presented. The robot records motion of surgical tool manipulated by master surgeon, and provides physical guidance to the trainee based on the recorded motion. The robotic manipulator can accurately reproduce the five degree of freedom manipulation of laparoscopic instrument during surgery. A hybrid spherical mechanism is applied for decoupling and reproducing the motion of surgical tool to facilitate implementation of control mechanism. The manipulators for left and right hands are capable of precise execution of a recorded trajectory with observed maximum error of 2.12 mm and 2 mm respectively during an experiment on user interaction.