Modeling and design optimization of master manipulator for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery

In the minimally invasive surgical robot system, the surgeon controls the movement of instruments with master manipulators, which is a typical physical human-robot interaction system. In this paper, the surgeon is fully taken into consideration for structural design optimization. The kinematics model of the surgeon’s arm was established to describe the irregular shape of surgeon’s operation space; The surgeon console model was established to describe the relative position between the master manipulators and the surgeon’s arm. To make master manipulator could behavior great dexterity in surgery, the dexterity index of surgeon operation space was proposed. Combined with the minimum gravity torque index and the redundancy index, this multi-objective optimization problem was solved by Salp Swarm optimization algorithm. Compared with the pre-optimization master manipulator, the performances of the optimized manipulator are overall improved by 10.3%, 23.0%, and 41.2% respectively in animal experiment.