A new spherical wrist for minimally invasive robotic surgery

Abstract:
Current robotic surgical devices use to be large, in order to cover the needed workspace and to be stiff enough for the forces that happens during surgery. The disadvantages of this large size of the devices are the ergonomics, collisions, and the interference with the surgeons. This paper presents the first steps that have been done on the development of a small spherical wrist for laparoscopic applications. The work present here shows the concept of the device, its design, that it was made under an intrinsically safety criteria, its kinematic analysis and the first results and images of the built prototype. The kinematic analysis is made and some simulations and first results are presented.