In traditional open surgery, physical and rigid links exist between the surgeon and the patient’s organs. The instruments are hand-held and operated under direct binocular vision.

With the introduction of laparoscopic techniques, the direct physical links between the surgeon and the patient’s organs are represented by the trocars, which are used for the insertion of different instruments, energised dissection devices and staplers - all having a remote end-effector and proximal actuation i.e., the surgeon’s hand.

Surgical tele-operated robots, such as the Da Vinci system (http://www.intuitivesurgical.com), are considered an important on-going evolution in minimally invasive surgery because whilst the main features of surgical execution are retained, the actuation of bi-manual tools is remote from the patient and is performed by the surgeon operating from a console.

Finally, in flexible interventional endoscopy, the rigid link between the surgeon and the organs becomes progressively weaker as the mechanical constraints are transferred from outside the body (e.g. the hand held device, the instruments inside the trocar, etc.) to lumen of an internal hollow organ. Mechanically as exemplified by the autonomous colonoscopes (http://www.eraendoscopy.com), the rigid transmission from outside is removed.

The system that we are proposing advances the current endoscopic surgical procedures by adding the bi-manual tele-operation equivalent to that of laparoscopic surgical robots.

The ultimate goal of ARAKNES is to integrate the advantages of traditional open surgery, laparoscopic surgery (MIS), and robotics surgery into a deeply innovative system for bi-manual, ambulatory, tethered, visible scarless surgery, based on an array of smart microrobotic instrumentation.