The medical robots

Hello! Welcome to my blog again. Currently, the industry of the robots is developing faster than even before. The world is on the threshold of the era of robotic revolution. The developers of robots always try to create smart robots that would exist in the human living as the assistant or friend. Currently it is already available to buy a robot-nurse, a robot for cleaning apartment and others that can perform certain programmed actions. The robots are becoming more useful in the medical, industrial and other areas. Due to a breachin the field of surgical technologies, the engineers invented a new surgicaldevice that gives an opportunity to carry out the most effective and leastinvasive surgical option of treatment. This is a robot Da Vinci.

The Da Vinci surgical system

In the past few years when a surgical intervention required, patients have only two choices: a traditional abdominal surgery with a large incision and scar after, or laparoscopy at which the incision is minimized. But now the surgeons can offer a minimally invasivemethod for the most complex operations using the robot Da Vinci. An apparatus Da Vinci is a new generation robot, which allows you to carry out the operation through small incisions using miniature manipulators and 3D cameras of high resolution, which gives the surgeon the most complete image of operation place. This is the only commercially available technology, which gives to the surgeon precision, dexterity and control of traditional abdominal surgery, while the surgery is performed through one or two centimeter incisions.

In the area of robotics, we usually concerned about the location of the objects in the three dimensional space. The location of these objects is described by two features: position and orientation. The structure of each robot is described bylinks and joints, which are manipulators of the robot. The robot Da Vinci has four manipulators: two of them work with tools and correspond to the right and left hand of the surgeon, the third controls the endoscope manipulator and the fourth performs additional tasks.  The movement of each robot is also described by the degree of freedom. The number of degree of freedom gives information about the number of independent movement that robots can perform. The Da Vinci robot uses instruments of EndoWrist®, which modeled on the human wrist, but with a large radius of movement. These instruments have seven degree of freedom, with the possibility to bend by 90 degrees. A human arm has also seven degree of freedom (DOF): a shoulder has three degree of freedom (can move up and down, to the side, and can rotate), a wrist has 3 DOF (can rotate, move up-down and to the side), and an elbow has 1 degree of freedom (open-close). The Da Vinci robot performs the same movement as human’s arm does. The range of the movement of the Da Vinci robot is very broad, it is 7 DOF and it can perform any task easily using its manipulators.

Reference list:

DavinciSurgery, “The da Vinci® Surgical System”. http://www.davincisurgery.com/da-vinci-surgery/da-vinci-surgical-system/ (accessed 24 October, 2014).

Roboticoncology, “Prostate Cancer Treatment - Da Vinci Robotic Surgery”. http://www.roboticoncology.com/da-vinci-robotic-prostatectomy/ (accessed 22 October, 2014).

Robots, “Intro to Solidworks – generator”. http://www.robots.com/faq/show/what-is-a-robot-manipulator (accessed 22 October, 2014).