Configuration and Kinematic Analysis of a Novel Hybrid Surgical Robot with a Ball Joint

According to the advantages and disadvantages of the serial and parallel robots´ configuration, a small, compact hybrid surgical robot model with a ball joint was introduced in this paper. By the requirements of its working characteristics and design principles, taking hybrid as the basic structure and ball joint as the core, the joint types and distribution of degrees of freedom were determined. The Denavit-Hartenberg(D-H) method combining with successive rotation transformation was adopted to build the mathematical model for forward kinematics problem. The approach of geometry method combined with algebra method was proposed to solve the inverse kinematics problem, and then was validated with an example. The research results have proved that the designed configuration can satisfy the needs of surgical action, which will provide a theoretical reference for the robot trajectory planning, dynamic analysis and online real-time calculation.