Review of surgical robotic systems for keyhole and endoscopic procedures: state of the art and perspectives.

Minimally invasive surgery, including laparoscopic and thoracoscopic procedures, benefits patients in terms of improved postoperative outcomes and short recovery time. The challenges in hand-eye coordination and manipulation dexterity during the aforementioned procedures have inspired an enormous wave of developments on surgical robotic systems to assist keyhole and endoscopic procedures in the past decades. This paper presents a systematic review of the state-of-the-art systems, picturing a detailed landscape of the system configurations, actuation schemes, and control approaches of the existing surgical robotic systems for keyhole and endoscopic procedures. The development challenges and future perspectives are discussed in depth to point out the need for new enabling technologies and inspire future researches.