Workspace Boundary Adjustment and Dexterity Analysis for Continuum Manipulators in Teleoperated Surgery

BACKGROUND: Continuum manipulators have exceptional bending capabilities and gentle interaction with surrounding tissues; these manipulators have been widely adopted in medical applications. In single-port surgeries, the surgical field is narrow and densely populated with tissues and nerves, often extending beyond the continuum manipulator's dexterous workspace. METHODS: This study proposes a control strategy designed to balance the trade-off between high dexterity and the spatial limitations of the non-dexterous workspace. This strategy employs Jacobian-based differential kinematics to compute solutions, thereby expanding the reachable workspace boundaries based on dexterity. By integrating the concept of spatial solid angles, the dexterity of the continuum manipulator within the reachable workspace is intuitively analysed. RESULTS: Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can effectively expand the workspace and enhance fault tolerance in spatial matching. CONCLUSIONS: The system maintains high trajectory-tracking consistency and orientation continuity within the non-dexterous workspace, thereby improving the accuracy and stability of teleoperation.