RoboRetrieve —A Hand‐Held Surgical Robot for Spillage‐Free Specimen Retrieval Tasks in Minimally Invasive Surgery

BACKGROUND: Specimen retrieval in laparoscopy involves extraction of a resected specimen from a patient's abdominal cavity. A major challenge is the spillage of retrieved content, causing dissemination of malignancy. METHODS: This paper presents RoboRetrieve, a hand-held robot to perform spillage-free retrieval in minimally invasive surgery. RoboRetrieve enables a surgeon to deploy a forceps and a specimen-retrieval bag through a single port into the abdomen and perform spillage-free retrieval of an excised specimen. RESULTS: Experimental results revealed that RoboRetrieve can manipulate porcine meat samples up to a mass of 100 g and perform spillage-free retrieval of phantom blood up to a volume of 1500 μL. Further, RoboRetrieve is tested for single-tissue retrieval, multi-tissue retrieval, and retrieval in a realistic scenario using a laparoscopic simulator. CONCLUSION: RoboRetrieve has great potential in performing spillage-free retrieval tasks. Future work involves design improvements and more rigorous robot testing in realistic scenarios.