Development of a novel hybrid haptic (nHH) device with a remote center of rotation dedicated to laparoscopic surgery

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel hybrid haptic device with a remote center of rotation for laparoscopic surgery, combining parallel and serial robot advantages to improve stiffness, accuracy, and workspace.

Contribution

A new hybrid haptic device architecture with 4 DOFs was developed, optimized with genetic algorithms, and validated against existing spherical parallel manipulators.

Findings

High stiffness and accuracy achieved

Large workspace with singularity-free region

Promising performance compared to similar devices

Abstract

This paper focuses on developing a novel hybrid-haptic (nHH) device with a remote center of rotation with 4 DOFs (degrees of freedom) intendant to be used as a haptic device. The new architecture is composed of two chains handling each one a part of the motions. It has the advantages of a parallel robot as high stiffness and accuracy, and the large workspace of the serial robots. The optimal synthesis of the nHH was performed using real-coded genetic algorithms. The optimization criteria and constraints were established and successively formulated and solved using a mono-objective function. A validation and comparison study were performed between the spherical parallel manipulator and the nHH. The obtained results are promising since the nHH is compared to other similar task devices, such as spherical parallel manipulator, and presents a suitable kinematic performance with a task workspace free singularity inside.