Controlling surgical robot arm using leap motion controller with Kalman filter

Abstract

Considering workspace restrictions and the importance of maintaining sterility in the operating rooms, the presence of contact-less user interfaces is of paramount importance in order to establish an efficient interaction between the surgeon and surgical robot. In this paper, a vision-based contact-less user interface named Leap Motion controller was studied that is able to track position, velocity, and orientation of the surgeon’s hand and detect gestures and movements of each finger and then, transmit data to the computer. Afterward, a surgical robot arm was controlled using LM’s received data which was classified through programming. In addition to the mentioned capabilities for LM, some characteristics such as low price, acceptable accuracy (0.1 mm), and high-rate data processing (more than 100 fps) have made this device utilizable and efficient. In this paper, the displacement of the hand’s palm center was set as a criterion for the displacement of the 5-DOF surgical robot simulator. Moreover, the angle forms between thumb and index finger was used as a command to open or close laparoscopic grasper. After conducting a robotic experiment to control a robot by following the hand path using LM, which produced the error with a maximum percentage of 6.19%, the effects of system input noises were minimized by the implementation of the Kalman Filter.