A modified agile-eye mechanism for robotic manipulation of wristed laparoscopic instruments

Replacement of the exclusively designed instruments of the robotic surgery systems with the commercial hand-held wristed instruments provides advantages such as single-usability and cost reduction. A 4-DOF robotic system, based on a modified non-symmetric 2-DOF agile-eye mechanism, was developed to manipulate the hand-held wristed instruments. The kinematics of the mechanism was analyzed, its dimensions were optimized, and a functional prototype was tested experimentally. The optimized mechanism had a great kinematic isotropy (condition number <1.31) in the target workspace. Experimental studies revealed a high tracking accuracy ($0.27 +- 0.01 deg rms for the worse case) and a reasonably acceptable compliance (0.19 deg/N.m and 0.45 deg/N.m for the first and second kinematic chains respectively). By satisfying the design requirement, the robotic manipulator provides an attractive choice for robotic surgery systems. The performance of the manipulator can be improved further by increasing the stiffness of the second kinematic chain and performing kinematic calibration.