Endoscopic BiManual 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.

Towards the Design and Development of a Pediatric Neuroendoscope Tool Hydrocephalus in the pediatric population is often treated with endoscopic procedures, in which a rigid endoscope provides a working channel and needed visualization for brain manipulation. The lack of flexible and steerable endoscopic tools limits the ability of the surgeon to conduct complex operations. In this paper, we propose the design of a novel tool for such procedures that uses the compliance of a bending flexural joint to build a compact steerable multijoint tool. These joints are machined into a tube made of a superelastic material to create two joints near the tip of the tool. The directional stiffness properties of the flexural joint are exploited to minimize interjoint coupling. We perform a static analysis of each joint and a kinematic analysis of the entire robot. We follow this with the design of a handheld controller for this robot, and analyze its ability to control multiple degreesoffreedom of the robot while minimizing the coupling between joints.