Kinematic Analysis of Instruments for Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery: Generalization of the Reference Task

In minimally invasive robotic surgery, actuated instruments are used that provide additional degrees of freedom (DoF) inside the human body. Kinematic limitations due to the instrument could endanger the secure execution of a surgical task. Numerous design alternatives are proposed in the literature whereas little work is done that evaluates the performance of these instruments in an objective way. This paper presents recent extensions towards a method from Deutschmann et al. (IEEE conference on intelligent robots and systems, 2013 [1]) to evaluate alternative designs of instrument kinematics with respect to their ability to perform surgical tasks. These extensions include further analysis of the task "suturing", one of the key tasks in robotic surgery, to extract the main components and generalize it with respect to the arbitrariness in which way this task occurs during a minimally invasive intervention. The paper concludes with more recent evaluation results and gives recommendations for instruments and their kinematic structure.