Approach and control for robot assisted sinus surgery

In traditional endoscopic sinus surgery, the doctor has to hold the endoscopy in one hand, doing the surgery in the complicate nasal cavity with another hand holding the surgical instrument. Based on the nasal surgery scene people have developed many robot assisted sinus surgery (RASS) systems, which have provided surgeons stable surgical vision, improved the efficiency of surgery. However, most of these systems acquire operator to select multiple robot path points from the nostril to the surgical area (sinus), which is very time consuming and laborious. In this paper, we develop an improved A-star algorithm that can obtain path automatically only need to select the start point and target point. After registered four work coordinate spaces, we apply traditional A-star path planning algorithm with robot kinematic characteristics. Unlike previous approaches, trying to ensure the Remote Center of Motion (RCM) by design mechanical structure first, the control algorithm makes the endoscopy move in RCM mod, which meets the safety requirements. We have obtained promising results when we test our new approach.