Automatic synthesis of compliant forceps for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel method to automatically synthesize compliant forceps for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery. Due to its monolithic structure and high dexterity, the compliant mechanism becomes an emerging solution to miniaturize surgical forceps for minimally invasive procedures. However, it is complicated and inefficient to use traditional rigid-joint-based kinematic method to synthesize compliant forceps. To cope with this problem, we have developed a topology optimization based synthesis method. A realized forceps was presented in the paper which illustrated the synthesis process and demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed method.