Kinematics and Dexterity Analysis of a Compound Continuum Manipulator for Minimally Invasive Surgical

The excellent performance of the continuum manipulators in a small space provides many advantages for developing minimally invasive surgical instruments. However, few researchers have paid attention to how to measure the dexterity of this type of manipulator, although dexterity is one of the key factors in determining whether it can be used in more fields. In this paper, a novel compound continuum manipulator (CCM) is proposed to design a minimally surgical instrument which has high-dexterity. An improved Levenberg Marquardt (ILM) method is designed to establish the inverse kinematics model of the CCM. The calculation time of the ILM method is more than 2000 times faster compared with the LM method. Then, the dexterity indexes of the manipulators based on inverse kinematics are proposed. The dexterity indexes of the manipulators show that the dexterity of the CCM is 1.231 times that of the CTM. This paper is critical for designing minimally invasive surgical instruments with high dexterity.