Design and evaluation of an industrial robot arm end-effector for robot-assisted surgery

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery is an emerging technology where the incision needle is operated by a robot manipulator to assist surgeons in performing interventional procedures such as biopsy and brachytherapy. Most robotic systems previously designed for needle interventions are stand-alone and operate in coplanar fashion, which require external mechanisms such as robot arms to align the needle onto the target tissue plane. In this work, we design a portable and light-weight needle steering platform that connects as an end-effector to a 6 degree-of-freedom industrial robot arm such as a FANUC robot. Standard FANUC operating functions would be used to control the motion of the end-effector and insert needles into the target tissues. Simulated gelatin tissues are used to perform needle insertions, and the performance of the end-effector is tested by changing the position and orientation of the tissue platforms. Finally, the proposed system will be tested for scalability by integrating with other industrial robot arms such as Yaskawa.