Exploring improvements on the complexity-performance ratio and usability of surgical robots

Abstract

Surgical robots are endowed with valuable features that allow surgeons mproving their work in terms of accuracy, quality, efficiency and liability. Tremor reduction, scaled movements, virtual fixtures, pre and intraoperative imaging are some examples of enhancing aids for the surgeon. Moreover, being robotics surgery still at an early phase of development, current research efforts are focused to develop robotic systems able to solve more complex tasks, though the associated costs of robotics makes the convenience of its use in some kind of interventions questionable. After analyzing the main performances and limitations of current surgical robots, this paper foresees dvances towards ideal robotic systems that satisfy the requirements of future robots.