Background: Despite its high lesion accessibility and versatility, endoscopic platforms have suffered from designing flexible manipulators with high payload capability sufficient to perform advanced endoscopic procedures.
Methods: A flexible robotic platform, K-FLEX, has been developed with a design of 17 mm in overall diameter. To overcome the shape distortion and deflection in payload handling, a strong continuum manipulator has been designed to have maximum resistance to the distortion. The kinematic analysis and mapping strategy have been established for the master-slave teleoperation.
Results: The proposed manipulator has shown 7.5 mm in trajectory variation to lift the weight of 300 g. Finally, the feasibility of the integrated K-FLEX system has been verified through three kinds of simulated surgical tasks.
Conclusions: The initial prototype of the proposed robot showed the possibility of advanced endoscopic surgery with improved payload capability.
Keywords: computer-assisted surgery; continuum robots; flexible manipulator; kinematics mapping; master device; minimally invasive surgery (MIS); surgical robots.
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.