Design and voice-based control of a nasal endoscopic surgical robot

In traditional nasal surgery, surgeons are prone to fatigue and jitter by holding the endoscope for a long-time. Some complex operations require assistant surgeon to assist with holding the endoscope. To address the above problems, the authors design a remote centre of motion based nasal robot, and propose a voice-based robot control method. First, through the operation space analysis of nasal surgery, the design scheme of the robot based on RCM mechanism is proposed. On this basis, the design parameters of the robot are analysed to complete the entire design of robot. Then, considering that the surgeon's hands are occupied by surgical instruments during complex surgical operations, a voice-based robot control method is proposed. This method obtains direction instructions from surgeons by analysing the movement of the endoscopic image. Afterward, a commercial speech recognition interface is used to realise the offline grammar controlwords lib compatible with both Chinese and English, and the overall strategy of robot control is proposed. Finally, an experimental platform for virtual robot control is established, and the voice-based robot control experiment is performed. The results show that the proposed voice-based control method is feasible, and it provides guidance for the subsequent development and control of the actual robot system.