Pituitary tumours are a common intracranial tumour and are usually surgically removed using a transnasal approach. However, the use of existing rigid surgical manipulators cannot be applied to all transnasal pituitary tumour surgeries and craniotomy is still required for resection. Cable-driven continuum manipulators allow surgical operations to be performed in the confined and complex environment of the human body and to reach deep lesions. However, it is difficult to ensure the motility and load capacity of the manipulator while maintaining its small size. In this paper, we present a surgical robot for transnasal approach to pituitary tumour surgery with a slotted skeleton structure with orthogonally distributed elliptical cutting slots. It has been designed, modelled and experimentally tested. Forward kinematics and simplified inverse kinematics were established based on mechanical analysis and an improved D-H parametric method. The bending capacity and load characteristics were tested by prototype experiments, and the obtained achievable bending angle is 50° and the maximum allowable load is 0.35 N, which meets the actual engineering requirements.