Design and Control of a Flexible Robot for TEM Surgery

For transanal endoscopic microsurgery (TEM), a flexible robot based on universal joints and series rods is designed. Based on the constant curvature model of flexible body deformation, the forward kinematics of universal joints is derived, and its optimization method is proposed. The mapping relationship among driving space, joint space and workspace of the flexible robot is established. A master-slave control method of the flexible robot is designed and implemented. An optical positioning system is used to measure the positioning error of the flexible robot's end. The experimental results show that the absolute positioning error of the flexible robot's end is less than 6.00 mm, and the repeated positioning error is less than 3.00 mm.