Inverse Kinematics and Modelling of a System for Robotic Surgery

We have developed an open experimental platform for robot assisted minimally invasive heart surgery with haptic feedback. The manipulator set-up is composed of two low-payload robots carrying delicate surgical instruments. One of the main requirements is full Cartesian control of the end effectors to enable the surgeon to precisely control the position and orientation of the instruments. This must be realized in the presence of severe mechanical constraints imposed by the small ports (“key holes”) in the patient’s body which drastically restrict the motion space of the instrument. In this paper we present the complete set-up with the underlying theory and the software simulator that allows us to test operations before applying them to the real system.