Synthesis of spherical parallel manipulator for dexterous medical task

This paper deals with the design and the analysis of a spherical parallel manipulator (SPM) for a haptic minimally invasive surgery application. First the medical task was characterized with the help of a surgeon who performed a suture technique called anastomosis. A Vicon system was used to capture the motion of the surgeon, which yielded the volume swept by the tool during the anastomosis operation. The identified workspace can be represented by a cone with a half vertex angle of 26°. A multi objective optimization procedure based on genetic algorithms was then carried out to find the optimal SPM. Two criteria were considered, i. e., task workspace and mechanism dexterity. The optimized SPM was then analyzed to determine the error on the orientation of the end effector as a function of the manufacturing errors of the different links of the mechanism. © 2012 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.