Design and Analysis of a Snake-like Surgical Robot with Continuum Joints

Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is one of the most successful applications of surgical robots. The surgical robots that have been proposed in the past had problems with stiffness and size. This paper presents a rigid-soft hybrid drive snake-like surgical robot for MIS. The design concept and kinematic analysis of the robot are introduced. The proposed continuum robot has a shoulder joint and an elbow joint with gear articulated configuration and a wrist joint with continuum configuration to meet the requirements of flexibility, appropriate stiffness, and miniaturization. The shoulder and elbow joint can achieve parallel lateral movement using active and passive motion to realize the cooperative operation of two arms and achieve decoupling between the joints. The forward kinematics is analysed and can be directly used for motion control. Preliminary function testing proves that the working space of the continuum robot manipulator meets the operational requirements.