Review on Design of Compliant Mechanism for Surgical Applications

Abstract

Compliant mechanisms are joint less mechanisms that rely on elastic deformation to transmit forces and motion. The lack of traditional joints in these single-piece flexible structures offers many benefits, including the absence of wear debris, pinch points, crevices, and lubrication. The topic is concerned with the benefits of exploiting elasticity in the engineering design of surgical tools, in general, and of minimally invasive procedures, in particular. Such systems are particularly amenable to embedded sensing for haptic feedback and embedded actuation with active material actuators. The paper consists of overview of design synthesis methods developed at the Compliant Systems Design Laboratory and focuses specifically on surgical applications. Compliant systems have potential to integrate well within the constraints of laparoscopic procedures and telerobotic surgery. Compliant mechanisms offer numerous advantages over their rigid-body counterparts. The synthesis with compliance technique synthesizes compliant mechanisms for conventional rigid-body synthesis tasks with energy/torque specifications at precision positions.