A Novel Reconfigurable Unit for High Dexterous Surgical Instrument

Surgical instruments with multi-degree of freedom (DoFs) are widely used in single-port surgery and natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery. In this paper, a novel reconfigurable unit, which can be used as a basic component of a high dexterous surgical instrument (HDSI), was developed according to an isosceles trapezoid mechanism. Then the unit was improved and optimized to obtain a larger rotational range. The new unit can prevent driving cable from slackening during the moving. Two multi-joint prototypes, which are designed based on the proposed reconfigurable unit, are developed and experimented preliminarily. Experiment results show that the unit can avoid cable slack and is suitable to be used for HDSI.