LBR Medical – KUKA AG

Research lead

Professor Pietro Valdastri

Research team at University of Leeds

Electronics and Electrical Engineering: Joe Norton, Bruno Scaglioni, James Martin, Giovanni Pittiglio.

Industrial Collaborator

KUKA AG

The STORM Lab (www.stormlabuk.com) at the University of Leeds is equipped with two KUKA LBR Med robots. This unique lightweight robot, produced by the German company KUKA AG (www.kuka.com), is the medically approved version of the LBR collaborative robotic arm. This robot is the first general purpose manipulator certified for clinical use in a surgical room.

The LBR Med is a general purpose manipulator with 7 degrees of freedom with a payload of 14 kg, featuring extremely high position accuracy (±0.15 mm) and joint redundancy. The system features the medically approved version of the KUKA Sunrise control system. The Sunrise Med OS and the Sunrise Med hardware cabinet are specially developed to have safety oriented control code and electrical isolation of the robot. The LBR Med contains sensors and software suitable for robot-human collaboration, so it can detect forces applied on the body of the robot, as well as at the tip, and react accordingly.

Thanks to medical-grade certification for both hardware and software, this robotic arm can drastically shorten the time-to-clinical-trial for medical robotic platforms. While at the STORM Lab we are using this robot to study the feasibility of magnetic colonoscopy, we welcome new collaborations towards first-in-human trials.