Zhengyu Wang

Hefei University of Technology · School of Mechanical Engineering

Cable-pulley-driven (CPD) manipulators are widely used in minimally-invasive surgical robots and systems. However, the cable-pulley systems also bring with significant nonlinear characteristics such as the hysteresis effect and elastic creep. Moreover, it is difficult to integrate the position and force detection elements at the end of the surgical...

This paper presents the design, analysis, and development of a novel four degrees of freedom (4-DOF) endoscopic robot with cable-driven multi-segment flexible continuum mechanisms. The endoscopic robot is mainly composed of the passive positioning arm, cable-pulley system and 3-DOF flexible continuum mechanism. The forward and inverse kinematics of...

The accurate shape sensing capability of the continuum mechanism is fundamental to improve and guarantee the motion control accuracy and safety of continuum surgical robots. This paper presents a data-based shape self-sensing method for a cable-driven notched continuum mechanism using its multi-dimensional intrinsic force information, which mainly...

The notched continuum mechanism is particularly suitable for natural orifice transluminal surgery benefiting from its small size and hollow structure. However, the widely used kinematic model based on constant curvature assumption does not reveal the actual deformation of the continuum mechanism, and its control accuracy is unstable, while the gene...

The implementation of the high-precision tracking control and external force-sensing ability of a manipulator is an important for achieving refined surgical robot operation. In this paper, a hybrid method based on data-driven and model-based algorithms is proposed for the manipulator of a cable-pulley-driven surgical robot. This method integrates a...

When performing microlaryngoscope surgery, surgeons must maintain their arm positions for a long time, which can cause arm soreness and affect the success rate of surgery. In this study, a novel tendon-sheath-driven upper limb exoskeleton with elastic joints (TULEE) is proposed and developed to support the arms of doctors wearing the TULEE. The fun...

This paper presents the design, calibration, and development of a novel cable-driven planar parallel continuum robot (PCR). The PCR employs a novel drive unit, which is mainly composed of cables, guiding pulleys and miniature linear actuators. The kinematic model of the PCR is derived based on the constant curvature assumption and the space vector...

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery requires accurate segmentation for surgical instruments in order to guide surgical robots on tracking the target instruments. Nevertheless, it is difficult to perform surgical-instrument semantic segmentation in unknown scenes with extremely insufficient intra-scene surgical data, despite of the attempts fo...

This paper presents the design, development, and motion control of a novel flexible robotic laparoscope (FRL). The main structure of the FRL includes a two degrees of freedom (DOF) continuum mechanism driven by two pairs of cable-pulley-driven systems, which are actuated by four miniature linear actuators. A constant-curvature model is employed on...

Achieving the high-precision control of cable-driven parallel robots (CDPRs) is complex because of their structural properties. In this paper, a quintessential redundant CDPR is designed as the research subject, and a continuous switching sliding mode controller based on workspace vision is implemented to enhance the accuracy and stability of traje...

Microlaryngoscopic surgery is a type of laryngeal surgery performed by surgeons using microsurgical instruments under the observation of a specially designed laryngoscope. While performing a microlaryngoscopic operation, the surgeons must maintain their arm position for a long time, which can cause arm soreness and affect the accuracy of the operat...

Industrial robots are widely used in the painting industry, such as automobile manufacturing and solid wood furniture industry. An important problem is how to improve the efficiency of robot programming, especially in the current furniture industry with multiple products, small batches and increasingly high demand for customization. In this work, w...

The Cable-Pulley-Driven System (CPDS) is widely used in surgical robots. It is an important foundation for long-distance drive and design of smallsized end-effectors. It is generally used as one of the key components of the minimally invasive surgical machine-driven unit. Compared with the traditional rigid driven system, CPDS is light in weight, c...

In this paper, a robotic ankle–foot orthosis (AFO) is developed for individuals with a paretic ankle, and an impedance-based assist-as-needed controller is designed for the robotic AFO to provide adaptive assistance. First, a description of the robotic AFO hardware design is presented. Next, the design of the finite state machine is introduced, fol...

In order to improve and realize an intelligent robot-assisted laparoscopic system, a novel flexible end-effector is developed for the laparoscopic robot. This paper presents the design, development, and preliminary experimental analysis of a novel robotic laparoscope with continuum mechanism. The Mechanical structure design of this flexible laparos...

In this study, a robotic ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) with a multi-functional series elastic actuator (MSEA) is developed. First, the biomechanics of a human ankle joint during walking is presented. Then, the hardware design of the robotic AFO is introduced, including the mechanical structure, actuator design and configuration, and electronics system....

This paper presents the development and feedback force control of a safe, lightweight, yet powerful, and stable passive force feedback data glove (FFDG), utilizing a disc-type magnetorheological (MR) brake as the force feedback device. Firstly, a detailed illustration of the mechanical design of the FFDG, including transmission structure, MR brake,...

The ability to sense external force is an important technique for force feedback, haptics and safe interaction control in minimally-invasive surgical robots (MISRs). Moreover, this ability plays a significant role in the restricting refined surgical operations. The wrist joints of surgical robot end-effectors are usually actuated by several long-di...

The external force sensing ability of the end-effector plays a significant role in restricting the refine operation of surgical robot. This paper proposes an external force self-sensing method based on cable-tension disturbance observer for a four-degree-of-freedom (4-DoF) surgical robot end-effector, which is actuated by three backdrivable cable-d...

The number of patients with knee impairments caused by a stroke, spinal cord injury, post-polio, injury, osteoarthritis, or other related diseases is increasing worldwide. Robotic devices such as knee exoskeletons have been studied and adopted in gait rehabilitation, as they can provide effective gait training for the patients and release the physi...

An autotracking algorithm based on a hybrid grey prediction model is presented for au- tonomously navigating the laparoscopic visual window of a robot-assisted surgical system. This method can be applied to any view angle of the three-dimensional (3D) laparoscope with a 200 ms predictive motion. Firstly, a preset parameter-based tracking algorithm...

This paper presents a study on the dynamics modelling and parameters identification of a flexible finger joint, which is based on Cable-Driven Series Elastic Actuator (CDSEA). This kind of CDSEA includes of a pair of driving and returning cable modules, which provides the driving torque of a small finger joint. The driving cable is driven by a DC m...

Surgical robot is a hotspot problem of the current research. This paper presents the dynamical analysis of an instrument arm for minimally invasive surgical robot. Firstly, the study presents a general dynamics modeling method, by which a dynamical model of the instrument arm is established and verified by simulation, then a general force of the tr...

The analytical solution of robot inverse kinematics can't be obtained by traditional methods of kinematical modeling when the robot configuration doesn't conform to the "Pieper criterion". For this problem, a new method of exchanging the establishment order of adjacent joint axes is presented based on invariance property of the forward kinematics r...

This paper presents a novel forecasting kinematic algorithm for autonomously navigating the 3D visual window of laparoscopic minimally invasive surgical robotic system (LMISRS). By the application of the proposed technique, a constant distribution area ratio of the micro devices can be guaranteed in the visual window; real-time concurrency motion o...

During the rehabilitation process, it is essential to accurately judge a patient's recovery in a timely manner. A reasonable and matched training program is significant in the development of rehabilitation system. This paper presents a new upper limb rehabilitation training system, which consists of an upper limb rehabilitation training device, a c...

The micromanipulator’s force feedback is one of the key research contents of minimally invasive surgical robotic system. Because the micromanipulator is a kind of compact construction which is suitable for valve installation with small space in surgery, especially for the influence of disinfection method, there are major difficulties and limitation...

This paper presents a preoperative positioning method, in order to realize the applicable preoperative position of instrument arms of minimally invasive surgical robot, which is consisted of two instrument arms and one laparoscope arm. Firstly, the kinematics model of instrument arm's fixed point (surgical pointcut of the trocar) is established, th...

Purpose – The characteristic of static is quite important especially for the manipulator with force feedback. This paper aims to improve the traditional static model by considering the limitations such as lacking of versatility and ignoring gravity of links. For this purpose, a new asymmetric mass distribution method on the analysis of universal “f...

Aims to decrease the work load in the operation and enhance the robot automatic level, this paper proposes a new kinematics method of automatic 3D visual window for Laparoscopic Minimally Invasive Surgical Robotic System (LMISRS) based on the kinematics model of laparoscope arm and the motion of the micro devices of the 2 instrument arms and the vi...

This paper proposes a new effective kinematics method based on the dynamic visual window (DVW) for a surgical robot that is equipped with two instrument arms and one laparoscope arm, to enable doctors to achieve operations with their visual habits under the laparoscopic visual environment. The problem of the consistency principle between the doctor...

With the virtual surgery simulation system playing an increasing role in the medical filed, a method of reconstructing a virtual gallbladder geometric model and an algorithm of collision detection based on S-AABB hybrid bounding box in virtual gallbladder surgery are put forward. In the process of geometric modeling, we can compile program to read...

With the virtual surgery simulation system playing an increasing role in the medical filed, this paper puts forward a method of reconstructing a virtual gallbladder geometric model based on the OpenGL graphics library. Firstly, we can use 3ds Max software to build a gallbladder model and write program to read and store the information only related...

To enable doctors to perform surgical operations based on their visual habits according to the laparoscopic visual environment provided by the surgical robot, the kinematic model of the laparoscope arm and the instrument arm of the Minimally Laparoscopic Surgical Robotic System (MLSRS) is studied, and a new kinematics method of instrument arm based...

A mathematical model of static for a parallel mechanism is generally established by using the force Jacobin matrix [1], [2], [3], which is inaccurate due to ignoring of self-gravity of the linkage [4], [5]. In this paper, based on taking self-gravity of the linkage into account, static analysis of a novel 3-DOF parallel mechanism with RUU joint str...

This article has analysed the problem of controlling the movement of the 3D visual window for the surgery robot operated by the doctors in their habits, and found out the relationship of position and pose between the objective window and the current window, and established kinematic model of the robot arm with a laparoscope, and then analysed the w...