A Preliminary Study on Cooperative Force Control based Guidance for Accurate Pre-insertion Positioning of Surgical Instruments

Abstract

This paper presents a force control based cooperative human-robot guidance system for transnasal endoscopic surgery. The aim is to accurately bring a long surgical instrument such as articulated forceps attached to a six degree-of-freedom robotic arm to the desired pre-insertion position. An appropriate orientation and position control is needed to ensure the safety of tool insertion through the narrow nasal cavity. This study explores an approach to providing the surgeon with highly accurate and intuitive operation of a surgical instrument for its pre-positioning. We report our initial development of a cooperative manipulation system and preliminary positioning experiments with an industrial robot arm.