Robotic Manipulation System Design and Control for Non-Contact Remote Diagnosis in Otolaryngology: Digital Twin Approach

Abstract

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the development of a non-contact medical robot that prevents infection is increasingly required due to the medical field’s heavy workload and emotional stress. To reduce workload and prevent infection, we propose a non-contact robotic diagnostic system that can be applied to conventional otolaryngology clinics. A digital twin model was used to leverage the initial design optimisation of the diagnostic robotic system. The proposed system was developed based on a master-slave robot architecture. The slave robot comprises a flexible endoscope manipulation robot and a parallel robot arm that controls other medical instruments. In contrast to the conventional approach that employs two hands, our flexible endoscope manipulation robot employs a novel 4 degrees of freedom (DOF) control mechanism to deal with an endoscope with a single robotic arm. Phantom experiments on the flexible endoscope system were performed to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system. The experimental results demonstrate the usability of the proposed system in terms of three evaluation metrics (i.e. diagnosis completion time, NASA task load index (NASA-TLX), and subjective risk score).