Hyper redundant miniature manipulator "Hyper Finger" for remote minimally invasive surgery in deep area

Abstract

A new robotic system named "Hyper Finger" for minimally invasive surgery in deep organs has been developed. The finger size of the latest version is 10 mm and the entire system is much smaller and lighter, and can be set up on a camera tripod. This is one of the smallest master-slave robots in medicine. Each finger has nine degrees of freedom and several unique mechanisms are employed to solve the fundamental issues of conventional wire drive manipulators. The new concept and system were verified successfully by in-vivo remote minimally invasive surgery. Further improvements of the system toward a clinical version are now underway.