Design Analysis of an Innovative Parallel Robot for Minimally Invasive Pancreatic Surgery

TL;DR

This paper presents the design and analysis of two innovative 4-DOF parallel robot architectures, ATHENA-1 and ATHENA-2, for minimally invasive pancreatic surgery, including kinematic schemes, stiffness evaluation, and workspace analysis.

Contribution

It introduces two novel parallel robot architectures specifically designed for pancreatic surgery, with comparative analysis to select the optimal design for development.

Findings

ATHENA-1 and ATHENA-2 have comparable kinematic schemes.

Finite Element Method simulations identified the architecture with higher stiffness.

Workspace analysis determined the most suitable design for surgical tasks.

Abstract

This paper focuses on the design of a parallel robot designed for robotic assisted minimally invasive pancreatic surgery. Two alternative architectures, called ATHENA-1 and ATHENA-2, each with 4 degrees of freedom (DOF) are proposed. Their kinematic schemes are presented, and the conceptual 3D CAD models are illustrated. Based on these, two Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations were performed to determine which architecture has the higher stiffness. A workspace quantitative analysis is performed to further assess the usability of the two proposed parallel architectures related to the medical tasks. The obtained results are used to select the architecture which fit the required design criteria and will be used to develop the experimental model of the surgical robot.