Bilateral Motion-Scaling System for Microsurgery
The goal of this project is the development of a force-reflecting
teleoperation system for use in microsurgery to scale down hand motions
and scale up tissue forces. The system consists of two six-degree-of-freedom
magnetically levitated wrists - the UBC joystick,
used as a teleoperation master, and a micro-slave
- both mounted on a common stator,
to be positioned at the surgical site by a coarse-motion stage. The micro-slave
is instrumented with a force-torque sensor
and a remotely operated micro-gripper for
handling tissue. The approach is described in [Salcudean
and Yan '94] and [Ku and Salcudean '96].
Experimental results showing stable bilateral control with master-to-slave
scaling of 10:1 in position and 40:1 in force have been obtained and are
described in [Yan and Salcudean '96].
Completion times and task errors for tasks typical of microsurgery have
been obtained using the teleoperation system and direct manipulation [Ku
'96]. The problem of microsurgical instrument position tracking for
direct manipulation is now being addressed.