Research and development of low-cost robotic systems for surgical planning

Abstract

Epilepsy procedures are in need of robotic solutions to perform electrode placing on the patient brain as human error is too high and this may cause surgical complications or errors in reading the data from the electrodes in post-operation. On the present day robotic-assisted-surgery for epilepsy requires a large amount of time and resources, and this project brings a study on low-cost solutions to surgical robots in the field of electrode placing and performs a first batch of robotic tests to have as reference for other studies or projects that may be interested in the capabilities of these solutions. With three built and modified robots and by means of mathematical positioning procedures for joint chains, known as inverse and direct kinematics, we perform an experiment to find the error of positioning the robot into a certain point. The outcome of these error results is quite high, if we consider them in the surgery environment, but present a first dataset of errors to take as reference and provide a first iteration of robots that can be further improved to reduce these errors.