(Professor S. Shankar Sastry)
Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is a revolutionary approach in surgery. In MIS, the operation is performed with instruments and viewing equipment inserted into the body through small incisions, minimizing the surgical trauma and damage to the healthy tissue, thus resulting in shorter patient recovery time. But there are disadvantages associated with reduced dexterity, workspace, and sensory input to surgeon which is only available through a single video image. [1]
At the Intelligent Machines and Robotics Laboratory, a robotic platform for laparoscopic surgery is being developed. The platform will incorporate centimeter sized robotic manipulators with force and tactile feedback capability for high dexterity manipulation. [1,2]
Our laparoscopic surgery platform will essentially be a master-slave teleoperation system. Even when the surgeon is located in the operating room with the patient, she is physically remote from the operation site, namely the abdominal cavity, and interacting through some manipulators and a video display. Therefore, the master/slave control algorithm is critical to achieve the desired performance.
We are currently designing a model based algorithm for bilateral master/slave teleoperation with force feedback. In telesurgery, the design challenges are quite different from the conventional teleoperation applications. For telesurgery, the fidelity of the manipulation is more important because of the delicate environment we are operating in, whereas instability resulting from hard contact is less of an issue as we are manipulating soft tissue. We are also studying perceptual capabilities of the human operator so as to be able to optimize the fidelity of the teleoperation.
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