General development plan of surgical robotic systems

In 2001, we started an endoscopic surgery robot for abdominal surgery The concept of the robot is performing various surgical procedures like open surgery in abdominal region without incising body surface. The developed robot has an endoscopic eye and two forceps type manipulators. Using the robot, the surgeon can perform grasping, incising and clipping a soft tissue with cooperative works of the manipulators. We also appended a navigation function to the robot. The function enabled a surgeon to understand a 3D orientation of the robot in an abdominal cavity. After evaluations of the robot using anesthetized pig, we specialized the robot according to various abdominal organs. Currently, we are expanding the concept of the robot and developing a new robotic system for the endovascular surgery. In this paper, we describe an outline of the robot and a future development.