Towards the Development of a Tendon-Driven Neurosurgical Robot

Brain tumors are among the most feared complications of cancer and their treatment is challenging due to the lack of good continuous imaging modality during the procedure and the inability to remove the complete tumor due to obstructions. A highly dexterous, small cross-section robot is being developed to overcome these limitations. The robot is being designed to remove the tumor which is outside the direct “line-of-sight” of the physician. In this paper, we report the design of a Minimally Invasive Neurosurgical Intracranial Robot (MINIR) using a tendon-driven mechanism. In the current prototype presented in this paper, the actuators for actuating the robot are not MRI compatible. The primary goal of this paper is to evaluate the performance of the robot motion and not the MRI compatibility of the entire system. The robot contains four links and four revolute joints. Pulleys and cables are put inside the robot to make the robot compact. The four revolute joints are placed orthogonally to have out-of-plane motion capability and can be controlled independently.