DEVELOPMENT OF A PARALLEL SURGICAL ROBOT WITH AUTOMATIC BONE DRILLING CARRIAGE FOR STEREOTACTIC NEUROSURGERY

Robot-assisted surgery is an active interdisciplinary field. Conventional surgical robots are mostly serial architectures, which have the advantages of large workspace, high dexterity and maneuverability. The disadvantages are low stiffness and poor positioning accuracy compared to the parallel structure robots. This paper presents the development of a parallel surgical robot for precise skull drilling in stereotactic neurosurgical operations. The dimensions of this robot are 35 × 35 × 45 cm3, and its weight is about 6 kg. This surgical robot has 6° of freedom. The feed carriage of the bone drilling device mounted the parallel surgical robot provides one additional translational degree of freedom. A master-slave microcontroller-based system is designed for pose control. In applications for neurosurgical operation, the workspace is on the surface of a skull located at one side of the robot. This work analyzed asymmetric workspace on the surface of a sphere representing the skull. A special socket joint design that enlarges the asymmetric workspace of the robot for about 30% is also proposed. This parallel surgical robot has been integrated with an automatic bone drilling carriage developed in our previous work to achieve completely automatic bone drilling.

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