High dexterity snake-like robotic slaves for minimally invasive telesurgery of the upper airway

This paper reports our efforts to develop an integrated system for telesurgery of the throat and upper airway. The system is described while focusing on the novel design of its slave robot. The slave robot is a 3-armed robot that implements novel Distal Dexterity Units (DDU's). These DDU's are dexterous robots for surgical tool manipulation and suturing in confined spaces. Each DDU is composed from a Snake-Like Unit (SLU) and a detachable Parallel Manipulation unit (PMU). The proposed design of the DDU's provides an enhanced downsize scalability and distal dexterity that are crucial for medical applications such as laryngeal surgery where simultaneous manipulation of 2-3 long tools through a narrow laryngeoscope is required. The paper presents the design of these units and the experimentation results with a 4.2 mm diameter SLU to be used for constructing the first DDU for the 3-armed slave robot.