Design of a New Image-Guided Surgical Robot for Precision Bone Drilling in the Lateral Skull Base

Objective: Design a new surgical robot which can aid surgeons during precision bone removal in the lateral skull base. It should be able to increase precision, safety and speed of bone removal procedures with guidance of preoperative (CT) image data. In some cases, for example, cochlear implantations, it should facilitate less invasive bone removal. Methods: After determination of the robots' requirements, a deterministic process was used to select the best concept from multiple generated robotic concepts. Detailed designing was performed for high precision and human–robot interaction. Results: The result is the design of a new, compact, seven degrees of freedom surgical robot. It is designed with six almost identical rotating modular units in series. On top of these six units, existing surgical drills can be clamped on a linear drilling housing. The design gives the possibility to have high rigidity, dexterity, large range of motion and a low-cost design with good accuracy. Moreover, it is designed for surgeon–robot interaction and can withstand drilling forces up to 50 N. The accuracy of the robot is estimated to be 50 µm and its weight is estimated to be 9 kg. It is designed for precision, robustness, compactness and minimal disturbance in existing operating rooms. Conclusion: The new precision bone removal robot might increase precision and safety of complex bone removal procedures and might reduce bone removal and drilling time. Exact numbers will be generated after realization and testing of one module, followed by full robot testing, which will be steps in future research.