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This work presents a design overview of a novel high DoF (degrees-of-freedom) system being developed for minimally invasive surgery of the throat. The system is designed to allow remote operation of 2-3 tools with high tip dexterity to enable suturing and soft-tissue manipulation while using the patient's mouth as the only entry port. The slave is a 34 DoF unit equipped with three snake-like distal dexterity units for surgical tool manipulation. Each of these units is a multi-backbone snakelike mechanism equipped with a detachable milli parallel manipulator allowing interchangeable tools to be used. The paper presents the outline of the kinematic analysis of the snake-like units and proposes one possible actuation redundancy resolution to allow further downsize scalability while reducing the risk of buckling of the primary backbone of the snake-like units. Finally, The work presents a first early experiment with a prototype of the snake-like unit.
Simaan et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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