Endoscopic Bi-Manual Robotic Instrument Design Using a Genetic Algorithm

Over the last few years, there has been a significant rise in designing small, agile and flexible medical systems that can navigate through natural orifices. In the case of endoscopic surgery, existing systems vary significantly from each other which raises the question of the existence of a general design that can do it all. In this context, this paper proposes to use a genetic algorithm combined with recorded suturing and anatomical data to automatically design a pair of robotic instruments for the i2Snake under strict mechanical constraints. The resulting automatically generated instrument designs include a 6 degrees of freedom instrument that can follow a predefined trajectory accurately and a more simple 4 degrees of freedom instrument that can accomplish most of the task. The results also showed the importance of having a prismatic joint to gain the precision required for endoscopic surgery.