A Hand-held Non-Robotic Controller of a Manipulator with Cable Guide for Minimally Invasive Surgery

Abstract

Hyper-redundant manipulators driven by cables are widely used in minimally invasive surgery due to their small diameter and bending in various directions. On the other hand, these manipulators risk generating a cable slack, which reduces the manipulator's precision. Thus, the master device for the manipulator should minimize the cable slack when the manipulator moves. This paper proposed a master device for driving the slot manipulator, which has a slotted guide for the actuating cable. First, we calculated how the cable length is changed by bending the motion of the manipulator using optimization. We designed the master device, including the disk for driving the slot manipulator, and optimized the slot guide's shape in the disk to minimize a cable slack. We simulated the changed cable length of both the master device and the manipulator. The difference in the cable length is only 0.07 mm. We verified the feasibility of the master device by the fabrication of the prototype and the experiment. This study has contributions to present the design of the master device included the optimized slot guide to minimize the cable slack, and validate the feasibility using the prototype.