Design and control of tele-matched surgery robot

Abstract

In the present paper, we develop a tele-matched surgery robot for a precise force reflection, and stable and intuitive operation. The term 'tele-matched' means that the motions of master and slave robots are matched precisely by bilateral teleoperation. The developed tele-matched surgery robot has three main features: (1) Coupling forces among joints of slave end-effector are removed. (2) Power transmission mechanism of slave robot is designed suitable enough for torque estimation without a torque sensor. (3) The motion of each joint of master robot precisely matches to that of slave robot. Consequently, as the key contributions of this paper, a new tendon mechanism is designed to remove the coupling forces, a torque estimation scheme is used to estimate the external forces without using any physical sensors, and by the motion matching between the master and slave robots, a surgeon can operate the slave motion by intuitively controlling the master device. The effectiveness of the developed robot is verified through a number of experiments. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.