Fasttracking Technology Transfer in Medical Robotics

Medical robotics has become a major, rapidly expanding sector within medical devices. The development of medical/surgical robot systems is a diversified field, emerging at the cross-section of the clinical development and the machinery domain. Consequently, the core components of surgical robots can be clustered into two categories, custom-developed devices and commercially available components. Since the certification and clearance process of a medical technology is overwhelmingly complicated, there is a widespread trend to rely more on off-the-self parts, even for the main element of a system, the robot manipulator itself. Research and development can significantly speed up by integrating a robot that has the necessary certifications. Nevertheless, together with the additional components, the system shall still be certified as a new complete setup. Previously, it was not possible to obtain a robot manipulator certified for the surgical environment as a component. Companies that wanted to bring forward robot-assisted surgery spent millions of dollars just developing a new robot arm. As a result, many promising schemes did not come to market or at such high prices that they were not able to reach a wide penetration. This article introduces the state-of-the-art in component-based medical robot development, focusing on the only commercially available, certified, versatile collaborative robotic arm, the KUKA LBR med.