A New Design of Two-Fingered Catheter Operating Robot for Vascular Interventional Surgery

It is of great value to design and develop CoR (Catheter-operating Robot) that can substitute a physician to manipulate a catheter in robotic-assisted vascular surgery. In this paper, we designed a new two-fingered CoR to simulate the catheter manipulation by a surgeon with thumb and forefinger, where the rotation and twist motions of the robotic fingers can achieve the conventional push / pull and rotation operation of the catheter respectively, and the open/close motion can achieve the rapid replacement of the catheter or operator. With the novel ‘parts reuse’ design, as few parts as possible are employed to achieve the two-finger movement in the mechanism structure, which lays a foundation for the miniaturization of the CoR in future. This paper first introduces the design and development of the proposed CoR, and then develops a CoR prototype. The operation precision of the CoR is analyzed by a quantitative experiment, and then a vitro-experiment is carried out to evaluate the validity of CoR in the robot assisted VIS with a glass vascular model. The experimental results show that CoR has the advantages of flexible control and high positioning accuracy, which is convenient for catheter control.