A robot-assisted cutting surgery of human-like tissues using a haptic master operated by magnetorheological clutches and brakes

Abstract

This study presents the preliminary experimental results of a robot-assisted surgery system featuring a six-degrees-of-freedom (6-dof) haptic master activated by magnetorheological (MR) actuators. The haptic master is designed to have a parallel mechanism to achieve structural stability and decoupled dynamic equations for translational and rotational motions. The translational motion is generated by MR clutches to achieve the repulsive force, while the rotational motion is generated by MR brakes to achieve the repulsive torque. After analyzing both the kinematic and dynamics equations of the slave robot, it is integrated with the haptic master. Subsequently, a feedback control system is established to achieve accurate tracking performance of the end-effector of the robot, and the desired motions are presented by dynamic animations and simulations. Further, a simple cutting surgery is performed on porcine specimens to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed haptic master-robot surgical system. A triangle-shaped section of the tumor is marked and dyed with black color on each specimen, and the cutting surgery to remove the tumor is performed, with and without the haptic feedback control system. It is observed that the surgical performance, in terms of surgical accuracy, achieved with the haptic feedback control system is much better than that obtained with only visual information without the haptic feedback signal.