Tension propagation analysis of novel robotized surgical platform for transumbilical single-port access surgery

In this paper, tension propagation analysis of a newly designed multi-DOF robotic platform for single-port access surgery (SPS) is presented. The analysis is based on instantaneous kinematics of the proposed 6-DOF surgical instrument, and provides the decision criteria for estimating the payload of a surgical instrument according to its pose changes and specifications of a driving-wire. Also, the wire-tension and the number of reduction ratio to manage such a payload can be estimated, quantitatively. The analysis begins with derivation of the power transmission efficiency through wire-interfaces from each instrument joint to an actuator. Based on the energy conservation law and the capstan equation, we modeled the degradation of power transmission efficiency due to 1) the reducer called wire-reduction mechanism, 2) bending of proximal instrument joints, and 3) bending of hyper-redundant guide tube. Based on the analysis, the tension of driving-wires was computed according to various manipulation poses and loading conditions. In our experiment, a newly designed surgical instrument successfully managed the external load of 1kgf, which was applied to the end effector of a surgical manipulator.