The Black Falcon: a teleoperated surgical instrument for minimally invasive surgery

This paper presents the Black Falcon, an eight degree-of-freedom teleoperator slave with a dextrous wrist for minimally invasive surgery (MIS). We show how teleoperation can address several key problems in MIS by increasing dexterity and degrees of freedom, by giving the surgeon some force feedback to feel instrument-tissue interactions and by eliminating geometric discrepancies between actual and observed tool motions. We discuss relevant design constraints, summarize the mechanism design and give data showing the quality of force reflection achieved. We demonstrate suturing along arbitrarily oriented suture lines in animal tissue, a task essentially impossible using current instruments.