Modeling and control of a parallel robot for needle surgery

The paper discusses the development of the dynamic model and the design of the control system of a new parallel robot called PmarNeedle. The PmarNeedle was purposely designed for needle surgery, one of the current frontiers of minimally invasive surgery, as slave robot driving the surgical tool within a surgical theater whose dimensions are small compared to in use robotic surgery theaters for laparoscopy. The paper presents the PmarNeedle kinematic and dynamic model used to define the control laws and to setup the control parameters. Simple PD control laws with and without non-linearities compensation filters have been implemented. The work is developed in ProEngineer, Simulink and SimMechanics. Results obtained in the simulation environment are discussed.