Collaborative framework for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery using a 7-DoF anthropomorphic robot

摘要

In this paper, we propose a control framework for robot-assisted minimally invasive general surgery (RA MIS) for physical human-robot collaboration using a redundant 7-DoF serial robot. When a redundant manipulator is used in RA-MIS, the control system implemented must guarantee that the surgical tool always goes through the trocar, i.e. the medical instrument placed at the incision point on the patient's body. In addition, the redundancy of the robot can be exploited to implement a physical human-robot collaborative strategy, allowing the medical staff and robot to work in a shared common workspace without affecting the performances of the surgical task, through a null-space compliance control strategy. However, classical null-space compliance laws are defined in joint coordinates, which have some limitations. First, an arbitrary desired joint configuration is rarely contained in the robot's null-space, making the desired configuration unattainable. Moreover, the joint coordinates are not a direct representation of the robot's null-space, which limits its exploitation.