Cooperative Position and Attitude Following Between Master and Slave Continuum Robots

In laparoscopic surgery, due to the complexity of the surgical environment and task, it is usually necessary to cooperate with multiple surgical robots to complete the surgical task. In this paper, a cooperative motion method of robots is proposed. Through the method, the slave robot follows the master robot automatically, so that the two robots can cooperate with each other under the condition of only controlling the master robot, thus reducing the work intensity of doctors in surgery. The cooperative motion method uses the forward kinematics of the continuum robot to solve the front pose of the master robot, and establishes the relationship between the front points of the two cooperative robots through the change of spatial coordinates, finally uses the inverse kinematics to solve the change of the ropes length of the slave robot. Several robot pose following experiments with different angles and distances are carried out, in order to verify the feasibility of the proposed method and calculate the average tracking error. The experimental results show that the average tracking error of the robot, which is under the control of cooperative motion method is 1.2%, the cooperative motion method can effectively help doctors to complete the cooperative task in laparoscopic surgery.