Design of a Quadramanual Robot for Single-Nostril Skull Base Surgery

Innovations in the field of continuum robotics are enabling increasingly thin and dexterous slave robots in surgical telemanipulation systems. Actuation of these robots is a challenge, because many degrees of freedom must be controlled simultaneously in a compact and unobtrusive package in the operating room. While significant progress in designing these actuation units has been made for both larger, non-medical continuum robots, and for certain types of surgical continuum robots, the design of clinically-relevant actuation units for concentric tube robots is a comparatively understudied area of research. To address this, in this paper we present the design of a robot intended to deliver four concentric tube manipulators simultaneously through a single nostril. We present the considerations that motivated the design and the prototype we have constructed to meet these needs.