Co-Axial Slender Tubular robot (CAST): Towards Robotized Operation for Transorbital Neurosurgery with Minimal Invasiveness
Shuai Wang, Qingxiang Zhao, Jian Chen, Mingcong Chen, Guanglin Cao, Jian Hu, Runfeng Zhu, Danny Tat Ming Chan
Abstract
Transorbital Neuro Surgery (TNS) offers a novel treatment towards the lesion inside skull pursuing minimal invasiveness. Most conventional TNS tools are rigid and straight, limiting the dexterity and accessibility in passing a small port. Bendable and steerable surgical tools provides an alternative for this issue. In this work, we proposed a dual-segment slender surgical robot arm for TNS, which is a Co-Axial Slender Tubular robot (CAST), and modelled it using novel approaches. Another contribution is tendon-mortise shaped slits along the axial direction, enhancing the overall stiffness. The bending of CAST is actuated by pushing/pulling distance, and the maximum diameter is only 1.7mm with high dexterity after mounting on a rigid robot arm. Experiments demonstrates that the proposed the slit design doubles the stiffness properties compared to traditional rectangle slit designs. The path-following task shows that the position error was maximally 3mm in open-looped control. Test on a skull model demonstrates that the whole system could successfully perform electrocoagulation procedure inside the depth of skull in a robotized manner effectively.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2024_coaxialslendertu,
title = {Co-Axial Slender Tubular robot (CAST): Towards Robotized Operation for Transorbital Neurosurgery with Minimal Invasiveness},
author = {Shuai Wang and Qingxiang Zhao and Jian Chen and Mingcong Chen and Guanglin Cao and Jian Hu and Runfeng Zhu and Danny Tat Ming Chan and Ming Feng and Hongbin Liu},
booktitle = {ICRA 2024},
year = {2024}
}