Comparison of Control Modes of a Hand-Held Robot for Laparoscopic Surgery

Abstract

Abstract. Teleoperated robots for minimally invasive surgery make surgeons loose direct contact with the patient. We are developing a handheld, dexterous surgical robot that can be controlled with one hand only, while standing at the operating table. The instrument is composed of a master part (the handle) and a slave part (the tip). This work compares the performance of different control modes, i.e. different ways to map the degrees of freedom of the handle to those of the tip. We ask users to drive the tip along complex trajectories in a virtual environment, using the real master to drive a simulated slave, and assess their performance. Results show that, concerning time, users with no training in laparoscopy prefer a direct mapping of position and orientation, like in free hand motion. However, users trained in laparoscopy perform equally fast with our hand-held robot and, concerning precision, make a smaller number of errors.

Evaluation and comparison of basic gestures in ex vivo laparoscopic surgery using a robotic instrument and traditional laparoscopic instruments

“…However, the elevated cost of remotehandling surgeries and the absence of benefits provided by laparoscopic tools challenge the idea to generalize the use of this technique [8]. Some experts in minimally-invasive surgery agree that the benefits provided by remote-handling tools are not required for the duration of an operation, but only during some precise steps of the procedure [9].…”

Lightweight Hand-held Robot for Laparoscopic Surgery

“…For this first prototype we used a joystick for orienting the tip and two switches for the roll movement; this does not seems to be the optimal way to control it. In [22] we have performed an interface study for the hand-held instrument and assessed the performance of several control modes. By combining these results with the surgeons' opinions, we are now developing a more intuitive interface.…”

Hand‐held robotic instrument for dextrous laparoscopic interventions

“…The data were smoothed with a low-pass filter, interpolated by means of a cubic spline, and downsampled to obtain a final trajectory composed of 100 points. The results in (24) showed that users with no experience with a laparoscopic trainer performed the exercise better with direct mapping of the position and orientation, i.e. with telerobotic systems.…”