Cutaneous and Kinesthetic Cues for Enhanced Navigation Feedback in Teleoperation

Abstract

In all the previous chapters, haptic feedback was used to render some physical property of the environment, such as its stiffness or resistance to needle penetration. However, this is not the only way the user can benefit from haptic stimuli in robotic teleoperation. There is in fact a growing interest in haptics for guidance, wherein haptic stimuli are used to provide navigation information to the human operator. In this chapter we address this challenge and propose a novel teleoperation system for steering flexible needles. It enables clinicians to directly maneuver the surgical tool while providing them with navigation cues through a combination of kinesthetic and vibrotactile feedback. An ultrasound-guided tracking algorithm tracks in real-time the needle tip and estimates its reachable region. A steering algorithm then computes ideal position and orientation of the needle to always keep the target in its reachable region. The master system uses this information to provide the clinician with haptic feedback about the needle’s ideal position and orientation. This information is provided as a combination of kinesthetic and vibrotactile force. Twenty participants carried out an experiment of teleoperated needle insertion into a soft-tissue phantom, considering four different experimental conditions. Participants were provided with either mixed kinesthetic-vibrotactile feedback or mixed kinesthetic-visual feedback. Moreover, we considered two different ways of computing ideal position and orientation of the needle: with or without set-points. Vibrotactile feedback was found more effective than visual feedback in conveying navigation cues.