Bitrack: a friendly four arms robot for laparoscopic surgery

INTRODUCTION For years, robotic laparoscopic surgery has motivated research and initiatives with the development of robotic systems offering different kind of solutions, being Bitrack a new option. At present the market is dominated by DaVinci, which has become a benchmark in this speciality. Laparoscopic robots offer precision and accessibility since their instruments are endowed with 3 DoF, for their orientation, which are missing in standard laparoscopy. This paper presents the Bitrack system, which is a new laparoscopic surgical robot, designed at UPC, and currently undergoing the process of certification by a spin-off created for its exploitation, RSS. This new robot aims to obtain the same benefits and accuracy as the current benchmark but overcoming some dependencies that current robotic surgery poses. Many reports on studies that evaluate the contribution of robotics do not doubt on the improvements achieved with the use of robots in what refers to surgical quality and that more complex surgeries can be addressed than those performed by laparoscopy [1, 2]. The Bitrack system apart from these clear contributions of robotics also provides the concept of hybrid surgery. This concept implies the capability of performing an intervention alternating standard laparoscopy with other robot assisted phases according to the needs in each stage of the procedure. This performance has been achieved thanks to the Bitrack friendly design which allows a quick interchange of robotized instruments by their manual counterparts, less than a minute each, using the same conventional trocar. This paper presents the robot architecture and the experimental results achieved with the operational prototype.