Geometric Workspace Analysis and Transmission-Aware Dynamics of a Serial Spherical Tool for Microsurgery
For designers of microsurgical robots, this framework provides analytical workspace and dynamics tools that reduce reliance on numerical optimization, but the contribution is incremental as it applies known methods to a specific mechanism.
The paper presents a kinematic and transmission-aware design framework for a serial spherical mechanism with an additional translational degree of freedom for microsurgery, validated on a vitreoretinal surgery tool. The framework enables rapid selection of rotation axis orientations and evaluation of torque requirements without numerical optimization.
We present a kinematic and transmission-aware design framework for a serial spherical mechanism with an additional translational degree of freedom for microsurgery. The first contribution is an analytical workspace formulation that provides geometric insight into reachable motion and enables rapid selection of rotation axis orientations without numerical optimization. The second contribution is a dynamics-informed methodology for mechanisms driven by self-locking transmissions, supporting evaluation of torque requirements for a prescribed workspace geometry. The framework is accompanied by an open-source software package for friction identification and inverse dynamics analysis. Experiments on a purpose-built robotic tool for vitreoretinal surgery validate the predictive capability of the models and demonstrate their practical utility for engineering design.