Remote Palpation Using the da Vinci Surgical System

Abstract

The main advantage of using cutaneous-only feedback techniques, with respect to more popular kinesthetic approaches, is a higher degree of safety. In fact, cutaneous feedback guarantees the intrinsic stability of the teleoperation system. This is especially promising for those scenarios where safety is a paramount and non-negotiable requirement, such as in robot-assisted surgery. This chapter extends the previous evaluations of sensory subtraction to a robotic surgery scenario. It presents a novel force feedback system for the da Vinci Surgical System, capable of providing cutaneous feedback to the surgeon while guaranteeing the safety of the patient. Designed to provide contact deformation and vibration cues, the system is composed of a BioTac tactile sensor, mounted to one of the robot’s slave tools, and a cutaneous device, attached to the corresponding master controller. Contact deformations and vibrations sensed by the BioTac are directly mapped to input commands for the cutaneous device’s motors using a novel model-free data-driven algorithm. The cutaneous display continually moves, tilts, and vibrates a flat plate at the operator’s fingertip to optimally reproduce the tactile sensations experienced by the BioTac. The proposed approach was tested by having eighteen subjects use the augmented da Vinci robot to palpate a heart model. Cutaneous feedback significantly improved palpation performance in all the considered metrics.