Design of a Transoral Laryngeal Surgery Robot Based on Rigid-flexible Coupling Structure

Master-slave surgical robot has gained significant attention in minimally invasive surgery because of their dexterity and eye-hand coordination. In this paper, a transoral surgical robot based on rigid-flexible coupling structure is designed. The flexible manipulator with an outer diameter of 4mm and multi-axis rigid manipulator are combined to form the slave side, and force-feedback controlling devices are adopted as the master side. A band-limited multiple Fourier linear combiner algorithm based on input weight(Iw-BMFLC) is introduced for the reduction of physiological tremor on the master side and the phase delay in the process of tremor reduction can be effectively addressed. Based on the incremental mapping algorithm, a control strategy and a user interface are developed. To improve the motion accuracy, a polynomial-based kinematic modeling approach is designed in this paper and the continuum-based flexible manipulator is kinematically calibrated to carry out the trajectory planning experiment. Results of the real experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed kinematic model when completing trajectory planning tasks, especially compared to the constant curvature model. In the end, animal experiments are also conducted by master–slave teleoperation to verify the force capability and dexterity of the robot.