Actuation and Integration of a Suturing Device into the DLR MiroSurge System

Abstract

With the increasing success of robot-assisted surgery, more and more robots are entering the operating room and enabling many new surgical techniques. In addition to enabling more and more new operating procedures and improving existing practices, care must also be taken to adapt already known techniques to this robot-assisted environment. One of the most important surgical procedures is surgical suturing. However, this causes problems for robot-assisted surgery. It is very time-consuming and challenging to automate. This work presents an approach for automated surgical suturing using a suturing instrument for the robotic system MiroSurge of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). An adapter is designed, which updates the control of all relevant degrees of freedom for the suturing instrument. In addition to the mechanical design of the adapter, both the motor control and the kinematic modelling are presented in this paper. A prototype of the interface is then evaluated in various tests. The adapter presented in this work lays the foundation for automated minimally invasive suturing with the MiroSurge platform.