A class of 1 DOF planar RCM mechanism based on motion-reproduce method

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) robot has made great progress in recent years. A crucial design challenge in developing an MIS robot is the construction of the remote center-of-motion (RCM) mechanism. RCM mechanism is a kind of mechanism whose end link can rotate around a visual point distal from the mechanism, but the point has no physical connection with the link. This paper proposes a motion-reproduce method to generate RCM mechanisms, and several novel RCM mechanisms are obtained. The main principle of this method is to reproduce the rotation motion of a single or all the point on the rotating links. If the sources of motion reproduction are from points on different links, a complete RCM mechanism can be achieved by combining two obtained mechanisms together. The proposed method can be applied on many other typical mechanisms to generate RCM mechanisms besides the mentioned mechanisms in this paper.