Development of a new 3-DOF parallel manipulator for minimally invasive surgery

This article proposes a novel dexterous endoscopic parallel manipulator for minimally invasive surgery. The proposed manipulator has 3 degrees of freedom (3-DOF), which consist of two rotational DOFs and one translational DOF (2R1T DOFs). The manipulator consists of 3 limbs exhibiting identical kinematic structure. Each limb contains an active prismatic joint followed by 2 consecutive passive universal joints. The proposed manipulator has a unique arrangement of its joints' axes. This unique arrangement permits large bending angles, +/- 90 degrees in any direction, and a workspace almost free from interior singularities. These advantages allow the proposed manipulator to outperforms existing surgical manipulators. However, this unique arrangement makes the analysis of the robot extremely difficult. Therefore, a geometrical/analytical approach is used to facilitate its singularity analysis. Construction of the virtual prototype is accomplished using ADAMS software to validate the proposed manipulator and its bending capability. A closed-form solution for inverse kinematics is obtained analytically. Also, the forward kinematics solution is obtained numerically. Moreover, evaluation of the workspace is achieved using motion/force transmissibility indices. A practical experiment has been performed using a scaling technique and PID controller. The experimental results show the feasibility of the teleoperated surgical system using the proposed parallel manipulator as the slave.