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This paper deals with the control of a redundant cobot arm to accomplish peg-in-hole insertion tasks in the context of middle ear surgery. It mainly focuses on the development of two shared control laws that combine local measurements provided by position or force sensors with the globally observed visual information. We first investigate the two classical and well-established control modes, i.e., a position-based end-frame tele-operation controller and a comanipulation controller. Based on these two control architectures, we then propose a combination of visual feedback and position/force-based inputs in the same control scheme. In contrast to the conventional control designs where all degrees of freedom (DoF) are equally controlled, the proposed shared controllers allow teleoperation of linear/translational DoFs while the rotational ones are simultaneously handled by a vision-based controller. Such controllers reduce the task complexity, e.g., a complex peg-in-hole task is simplified for the operator to basic translations in the space where tool orientations are automatically controlled. Various experiments are conducted, using a 7-DoF robot arm equipped with a force/torque sensor and a camera, validating the proposed controllers in the context of simulating a minimally invasive surgical procedure. The obtained results in terms of accuracy, ergonomics and rapidity are discussed in this paper.

This paper deals with the control of a redundant robotic system for middle ear surgery (i.e., cholesteatoma tissues removal). The targeted robotic system is a macro-micro-scale robot composed of a redundant seven degrees of freedom (DoFs) on which is attached a two DoFs robotized flexible fiberscope. Two different control architectures are proposed to achieve a defined surgical procedure to remove the pathological tissue inside the middle ear cavity. The first proposed control mode is based on the position-based tele-operation of the entire system using a joystick (Phantom Omni) as a master arm. The second one combines comanipulation of the seven DoFs robotic arm using an embedded force/torque sensor and an end-frame tele-operation of the remaining two DoFs fiberscope using a lab-made in-hand joystick. Experimental validation is performed to evaluate and compare the performance of both developed control schemes. The obtained results using the labmade platform and the proposed controllers are discussed.

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This paper deals with the control of laser spot in the context of minimally invasive surgery of the middle ear, e.g., cholesteatoma removal. More precisely, our work concerns with the exhaustive burring of residual infected cells after a primary mechanical resection of the pathological tissues since the latter cannot guarantee the treatment of all the infected tissues, the remaining infected cells cause regeneration of the diseases in 20%-25% of cases, which require a second surgery 12-18 months later. To tackle such a complex surgery, we have developed a robotic platform that consists of the combination of a macro-scale system (7 degrees of freedoms (DoFs) robotic arm) and a micro-scale flexible system (2 DoFs) which operates inside the middle ear cavity. To be able to treat the residual cholesteatoma regions, we proposed a method to automatically generate optimal laser scanning trajectories inside the regions and between them. The trajectories are tacked using an image-based control scheme. The proposed method and materials were validated experimentally using the lab-made robotic platform. The obtained results in terms of accuracy and behavior meet perfectly the laser surgery requirements.