Surgical robotics helps to increase the surgeon’s accuracy and limits the invasiveness of the surgery. The complexity of an operation room implies to design surgical devices that are as compact as possible and that can be easily sterilized. One interesting design approach is to combine compliant mechanisms, which have a monolithic structure, and piezoelectric actuators. Based on this approach, a robotic device for minimally invasive coronary artery bypass grafting has been proposed previously in our laboratory. This device successfully helps to increase the stabilization of the heart surface during the surgery but its compactness needs to be increased for an optimal integration in the operation room. Based on the need to reduce the compensation mechanism of this device, the problem of the design of compliant mechanisms with strong integration constrains is studied in this PhD thesis. First, the possibility to integrate the compensation mechanism directly in the shaft is considered. Then, the possibility to reduce the compensation mechanism at the end of the shaft by considering an assembly of planar manufactured structures is considered. Among the contributions, we propose an original design method based on the analysis of singularities of parallel manipulators in planar configuration. We also propose an original optimization method based on ant colony optimization in order to optimize the compliant architectures proposed in this work.
