Automatic synthesis of compliant forceps for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery

Due to its monolithic structure and high dexterity, the compliant mechanism becomes an emerging solution to miniaturize surgical forceps for minimally invasive procedures. However, it is complicated and inefficient to use traditional rigid-link-based kinematic method to synthesize compliant forceps. In this paper, we present a topology-optimization-based method to automatically synthesize compliant forceps for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS). The basic geometry modeling tool and the automatic synthesis algorithm were both implemented in Matlab. Several synthesis examples were presented to show the performance of the proposed method. The realized forceps and a continuum manipulator have been constructed and 3D-printed, which demonstrated the application of the automatic synthesis method in RMIS.