A Magnetic Actuated Fully Insertable Camera Robot For Single Incision Laparoscopic Surgery

International audienceSingle Incision Laparoscopic Surgery (SILS) is a popular, and also a challenging minimally invasive surgery technique. Its benefits include less bleeding and post-operative pain, faster recovery, and better cosmetic results compared with multi-port minimally invasive surgery. But a shared single incision significantly increases the difficulty of manipulation and triangulation of surgical instruments, especially for conventional long stick laparoscopic cameras with limited field of views. In this work, we demonstrates an innovative Magnetic Actuated Robotic Surgical (MARS) camera system with two-degree of freedom (2-DOF) orientation control for single incision laparoscopic surgery. As illustrated in Figure 1, the MARS camera system design features a unified, motor-free actuation mechanism for anchoring, navigating, and rotating the camera by externally generated rotational magnetic field. The key component and novelty of the actuation mechanism design is the permanent magnetic driving unit, which is referred to as a rotor, driven externally by a specially designed magnetic stator