Workspace and dexterity analysis of the hybrid mechanism master robot in Sinaflex robotic telesurgery system: An in vivo experiment.

Sinaflex robotic telesurgery system has been introduced recently to provide ergonomic postures for the surgeon along with dexterous workspace for robotic telesurgery. The robot is described, and the forward and inverse kinematics are derived and validated by an experiment. The robot and operational workspaces and their dexterity are investigated and compared using the data collected during a dog vasectomy robotic telesurgery by Sinaflex. According to the simulation results, the workspace of the end effector is as large as 914.56 × 105 mm3, which can completely cover the ergonomic human hand workspace. The dexterity of the robot for the total and operational workspace is 0.4557 and 0.6565, respectively. In terms of the workspace size and the amount of dexterity, Sinaflex master robot can be considered a good choice to fulfil the requirements of the surgeon side robot in robotic telesurgery systems.

Kinematic and Workspace Analysis of the Master Robot in the Sinaflex Robotic Telesurgery System.

Robotic telesurgery systems, including master and slave robots, have emerged in recent years to provide benefits for both surgeons and patients. Surgeons use the master manipulator to navigate the slave robot. The Sinaflex telesurgery system introduced recently by Sina Robotics and Medical Innovators Co., Ltd. consists of two main subsystems: master robotic surgery console and slave surgery robots. As the surgeon use the master robot's handles to control the slave surgery robots, it is important for the master robot to provide the ergonomic postures for the surgeon and also providing a large enough workspace and good manipulability for the surgeon to control it. So in this paper, workspace, manipulability and isotropy of each handle at the master robot of the Sinaflex telesurgery system are analyzed. To this end, the kinematic of the master manipulator is derived, and its Jacobian is calculated. Using the simulation environment, the workspace of the master handle is obtained and drawn. The manipulability of the robot for each points of the workspace is computed. According to the results attained from the simulation study, the most manipulability values lie between 0.1 and 0.9 where it is greater than 0.44 for more than 50% of the whole workspace points of the end effector, which is as large as 574×484×560 mm.