Hand-Held Surgical Instrument with the Function of Self-Locking for Minimally Invasive Surgery

In order to improve the flexibility of the surgical instruments, a wire-driven wrist-like structure is proposed in this paper. The instrument has three degrees of freedom (DOFs) of rotation, yaw, opening and closing. Furthermore, we also acknowledge no coupling motion for each DOF. Moreover, the self-locking motion contributes to sustaining joint posture under external force. A static analysis for the end effector was conducted using the ANSYS software. At the end of this paper, a series of experiments for the prototype was performed. The results revealed that for the same surgical task, the proposed instrument had higher flexibility and the completion time of the operation tasks was obviously less than that of the traditional instrument. The results of the self-locking and operating force test showed that the surgical instruments perform well in maintaining joint posture under the force of 8.2N. The proposed surgical instrument meets the requirements of minimally invasive surgery (MIS).