Bilateral Control of a Teleoperator for Soft Tissue Palpation: Design and Experiments

Abstract— In robot-assisted interventions, providing a surgeon with haptic information regarding contacts made between surgical instruments and tissue can improve task performance and reliability. In this paper, a force-reflective user interface is used with a sensorized surgical instrument to form a masterslave test-bed for studying haptic interaction in a soft-tissue endoscopic surgery environment. After modeling and parametric identification of the the master and the slave, bilateral controllers are designed and teleoperation experiments involving a single degree of freedom surgical task on soft tissue (palpation) are conducted. The transparency of the teleoperator in terms of transmitting the critical task-related information to the user in the context of soft-tissue surgical applications is investigated.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Mahdi Tavakoli, Rajnikant V. Patel, Mehrdad Moallem
• Keywords: ICRA 2006, Robotics, Soft-tissue Endoscopic Surgery, Soft-tissue Surgical Applications, Surgical Instrument