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Updated: Aug 29, 2025
Design and Implementation of a Bespoke Robotic Manipulator for Extra-corporeal Ultrasound
Published on: January 7, 2019
Design and experiment of a 3-DoF master device with a 2-DoF parallel mechanism for flexible ureteroscopy
Jianchang Zhao1,2, Shuxin Wang1,2, Jiatong Wang1,2
1Key Laboratory of Mechanism Theory and Equipment Design, Ministry of Education, Tianjin, China.
Background:
Traditional commercial master devices and specialied serial master devices meet insufficient workspace, low intuitiveness, low stiffness, and poor accuracy during master-slave mapping for robot-assisted flexible ureteroscopy (FURS).
Methods:
This paper presents a 3-DoF master device for FURS. A 2-DoF parallel mechanism was designed and utilised in the master device for higher stiffness based on requirements analysis. A Back Propagation Neural Network was built for the forward kinematics of the parallel mechanism during master-slave mapping. Analysis of mechanical characteristics was carried out for the usability of the master device. A contrast experiment on the phantom was conducted to evaluate the performance between the proposed master device and a previous one.
Results:
The completion time for each trial of the proposed master devices is shorter than that of the previous master serial device. Meanwhile, the proposed device provides a more comfortable operating style than the previous one.
Conclusions:
The proposed 3-DoF configuration for the master device is with more intuitive performance. A better comfort level indicates its usability in clinical applications.
