Research On Flexible Robot For Minimally Invasive Laryngeal Surgery

The larynx is an important part of the human body and the portal of the respiratory system,which has a great impact on food swallowing,breathing,and vocalization.It has become a consensus to minimize the damage to the larynx tissue during the surgical process for reserving the functions.Minimally invasive surgery has increasingly become the mainstream of larynx surgery.Minimally invasive laryngeal surgery is mainly performed with the help of various retractors(such as self-retaining laryngoscope,Davis retractor,etc.).However,in this surgical method,the surgical space is narrow,the surgical vision and the surgical operation space are limited.There are still several problems,such as poor exposure,difficulty in reaching the lesion,and difficulty in precise operation.The medical robot provides a new solution to the above problems.This research designs a flexible robotic system for minimally invasive laryngeal surgery,which can use the bending of the flexible robotic arm to expand the surgical vision and surgical operation space.A novel flexible robot is proposed,which can reach double-section bending.The cabledriven flexible robotic arm is composed of a bellow,a set of cables and several joints.The joint is embedded in the bellow,and the flexible robotic arm is forced to bend by the cable.The flexible robotic arm reserves two surgical channels for surgical instruments and integrates an endoscope.A modular design scheme of the slave is proposed,which decouples flexible surgical operation module from the auxiliary platform.The flexible surgical operation module is designed to realize the main surgical functions.The module has the characteristics of small size and light weight,and can also be combined with commercial robotic arm to achieve more complex functions.The platform for the flexible surgical operation module is designed to assist the flexible surgical operation module to complete the operation.Summarize and analyze the basic bending shapes of the flexible robotic arm.Based on the assumption of piecewise constant curvature,a forward kinematics model is established.A method for measuring the trajectory of the flexible robotic arm based on 3D visual navigation was proposed,an experiment was design and analyzed.Use MATLAB to simulate the workspace of the robot.Master-slave control schemes based on proportional position control were designed for the three main movements: translation,rotation and bending.Based on the master-slave control scheme,the hardware architecture of the robotic system was designed.The software platform for the control system was built,and the human-computer interaction interface and the software processing logic were designed.Summarize and analyze the basic specifications of the robot.Design continuous-bending experiment and load tests to test the stability and load bearing capacity of the flexible robotic arm.Two model tests of vocal cord benign tumor resection were performed with the robot to verify the feasibility of the flexible robot for laryngeal surgery.The experimental result shows that the robot can achieve good exposure to vocal cords and perform surgical operations.