Kinematic modelling of a five-DOFs spatial manipulator used in robot-assisted surgery

Abstract

Since last three decades, research in the field of robot kinematics is boosted-up among different researchers worldwide. This is mainly due to their increased use in various challenging fields of engineering and science. One such challenging application is the use of master—slave concept in a robot-assisted surgery. The authors have already performed the kinematic study and gravity balancing of seven degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) surgeon-side manipulator (Singh et al., 2015a, 2015b). To meet these challenging demands, the most important aspect of a robotic manipulator is to develop an accurate kinematic model. In this direction, different researchers in the literature have made significant contributions. Out of these, the most prominent one is D—H parameters method, which was proposed by Denavit and Hartenberg in 1955. In the present work, this method is applied to a five-DOFs spatial manipulator, named as patient-side manipulator, which tracks the motion of surgeon-side manipulator during a robot-assisted surgery. The prototype considered in this work is a spatial serial manipulator, being developed at CSIR-CSIO Chandigarh. Experimental validations are performed and results are found to be in close agreement. © 2016 Published by Elsevier GmbH. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).