Realization of a Statically Balanced Compliant Planar Remote Center of Motion Mechanism for Robotic Surgery

Robot assisted minimally invasive surgery helps overcome some of the limitations like limited dexterity, fulcrum effect, and lack of 3D vision in manual laparoscopic procedures [1]. A Remote Centre of Motion (RCM) mechanism is an essential part of tele-operated surgical robots. An RCM mechanism enables a rigid surgical tool to maintain a kinematic constraint about the insertion point on a patient’s body [2]. It permits a surgical tool to pivot only about the insertion point and prevents tool translation about the insertion point [3]. A parallelogram architecture based RCM mechanism is one of the most commonly used RCM mechanisms in surgical robots [4] due to its simplicity and large usable range of motion. Commercially available surgical robots such as da Vinci™ from Intuitive Surgical Inc. [5] use synchronous transmission [2] based passive RCM mechanism as a substitute for parallelogram based RCM.