A Novel Machine Interface for Scaled Telesurgery

Abstract

We have developed a system architecture that will allow a surgeon to employ direct hand-eye coordination to conduct medical procedures in a remote microscopic environment. In this system, a scaled real-time video image of the workspace of a small robotic arm, taken from a surgical microscope camera, is visually superimposed on the natural workspace of a surgeon via a half-silvered mirror. The robot arm holds a small tool, such as a microsurgical needle holder or microsurgical forceps, and the surgeon grasps a second tool connected to a position encoder, in this case, a second robot arm. The views of the local and remote environments are superimposed such that the tools in the local and remote environments are visually merged. The position encoder and small robot arm are linked such that movement of the tool by the operator produces scaled-down movement by the small robot tool. To the surgeon, it seems that his hands and the tool he or she is holding are moving and interacting with the remote environment, which is really microscopic and at a distance. Our current work focuses on using a position-controlled master-slave robot linkage with two 3 degree of freedom haptic devices, and we are pursuing the use of a 6-to-7 degree of freedom master-slave linkage to produce more realistic interaction.