title: Toward a hybrid snake robot for single-port surgery.
abstract: We propose a new snake-like robot for use in single-port minimally invasive surgery. The snake robot is made of a concentric tube robot and a highly articulated robotic probe. The probe operates as a stiff shield for the concentric tube robot. Consequently, the snake robot provides simultaneously high tip stiffness and dexterity that cannot be obtained by the single use of any of two robots. A critical design challenge is achieving a small radius of curvature for the hybrid snake. A mechanic model is presented for computing the minimum achievable radius of curvature for the hybrid snake. Experiments validate the mechanic model.
authors.affiliation: Cardiac Surgery Department, Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Va Medical Ctr-W Roxbury, Boston, MA, USA. mahvash@hms.harvard.edu
authors.forename: Mohsen
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mahvash
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zenati
mesh_terms: D017076:Computer-Aided Design; D004867:Equipment Design; D019544:Equipment Failure Analysis; D019060:Minimally Invasive Surgical Procedures / Q000295:instrumentation*; D012371:Robotics / Q000295:instrumentation*