Using General-Purpose Serial-Link Manipulators for Laparoscopic Surgery with Moving Remote Center of Motion

Minimally invasive surgical systems are being widely used to aid operating rooms across the globe. Although arguably successful in laparoscopic surgery, the da Vinci robotic system has limitations mostly regarding cost and lack of patient physiological motion compensation. To obtain a more cost-effective alternative, earlier works used general-purpose fully actuated serial-link robots to control instruments in laparoscopic research using constrained Jacobian techniques. In contrast with those works, we present a new technique to solve the laparoscopic constraints for the serial-link manipulator by using a constrained trajectory. This novel technique allows complex 3D remote center-of-motion trajectories to be taken into account. Moreover, it does not have problems related to drifting, and is less prone to singularity related issues as it can be used with redundant manipulators. The proof-of-concept experiments are done by performing artificial trajectories with static and moving trocar points using a physical robot manipulator. Furthermore, the system is tested using user input of 13 medically untrained personnel in an endoscope navigation task. The experiments show that the system can be operated reliably under arbitrary and unpredictable user inputs.