Design of a Parallel Robot for Needle-Based Interventions on Small Animals

In this paper, a novel 5-degrees-of-freedom robot for performing needle-based interventions on small animal subjects is presented. The robot can realize dexterous alignment of the needle using two parallel mechanisms, and has a syringe mechanism to insert needles to subjects. Operations on small animals require high accuracy positioning during needle insertion. The kinematic calibration procedure of the robot using an optical tracker as an external sensor is presented to enhance accuracy of the system. After the kinematic calibration, the positioning accuracy of the needle tip is measured as 0.4 mm RMS. The robot design is light weight, and has a motion bandwidth of 4 Hz. The robot can track reference trajectories with a closed-loop controller.