Design and analysis of a haptic master manipulator for minimally invasive surgery

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery has gained popularity in recent years, such as Zeus, da-Vinci and MicroHand A, which can provide surgeons with enhanced visual feedback and dexterity of instruments. Master manipulator is an important component of the surgical robot system, whose posture recognition accuracy, operation dexterity and force feedback feature will have profound influence to the surgeons' user experience and affect the quality of the surgery. At present, different robotic surgery systems have their own master manipulators, but the force feedback feature is missing. This paper proposes a 8-DOF (degree of freedom) master manipulator with force feedback function. It consists of three parts: arm mechanism, wrist mechanism and clamp mechanism. The arm mechanism is driven by cables for better backdrivability, wrist mechanism consists of four joints with axes intersected at one point. The configuration and link length for arm mechanism has been optimized based on kinematic analysis, the detailed design for the whole master manipulator is described, and the force feedback algorithm is also detailed in this paper.