Design and Development of a Task Specific Robot for Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection of Early Gastrointestinal Cancers

This paper presents a task specific robot for the procedure of endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD). This robot has two arms with nine degrees of freedom (DOF), and the capability of tissue elevation and dissection. An optimal design of these robot arms requires the use of shape memory alloy (SMA) wire and steel wire actuators to develop an improved actuation mechanism, which enables force to be transmitted to the distal tip of the robot arms for an efficient tissue dissection. The details of the robot such as robot arm design and kinematics, driven unit mechanism and novel controller design are presented. Two endoscopists, who are also upper gastrointestinal surgeons, independently evaluated our robot in a bench porcine model ex vivo. Both of them were able to complete the procedure within 75-85% of the marked submucosal tissue and within 30 minutes.