5 accepted papers
Remote Center of Motion (RCM) mechanism is widely used in surgical robots for Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS). For endoscopic spine surgery, the surgical robot requires RCM mechanism with sufficient stiffness and compact end effector to manipulate hard tissues while avoiding interference with other…
Shape sensors are important for safer and more dexterous manipulation of the medical catheters. Among the electromagnetic based shape sensors, a voice coil shape sensor measures the variation of a mutual inductance between the coils placed along the tube due to the bending of the tube. Owing to the…
We present a transformable catheter head structure for endoscopic catheter allowing the simultaneous use of a camera module and a large tool channel introduced through a small incision. At the site of interest, the head with a camera can be expanded from the initial straight configuration, which ope…
A laparoscopic surgery can be made less invasive by utilizing slimmer tools. However, at the size scale of the microlaparoscopic instruments, it has been very challenging to incorporate a wrist mechanism for dexterous manipulation at the surgical sites. In this letter, we present a 5-mm wristed inst
Kinematic models of concentric tube robots have matured from considering only tube bending to considering tube twisting as well as external loading. While these models have been demonstrated to approximate actual behavior, modeling error can be significant for medical applications that often call fo…