Development of the SAIT single-port surgical access robot--slave arm based on RCM mechanism.

An innovative single-port surgical robot has recently been developed by the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT). The robot can reach various surgical sites inside the abdominal cavity from a single incision on the body. It has two 7-DOF surgical tools, a 3-DOF endoscope, a flexible hyper-redundant 6-DOF guide tube, and a 6-DOF manipulator. This paper primarily focuses on the manipulator, called a slave arm, which is capable of setting the location of a Remote Center Motion (RCM) point. Because the surgical tools can explore the abdominal area through a small incision point when the RCM point is aligned with the incision area, the RCM mechanism is an integral part of the manipulator for single-port surgery. The mechanical feature, operational principle, control method, and the system architecture of the slave arm are introduced in this paper. In addition, manipulation experiments conducted validate its efficacy.