Master–slave real-time control strategy in Cartesian space for a novel surgical robot for minimally invasive surgery

Abstract

Robot-assisted systems can enhance the precision of surgical procedures, and have been widely used in minimally invasive surgery (MIS). This paper proposes the master–slave real-time control strategy for a novel surgical robot for MIS. The robot is equipped with two instrument manipulators and one laparoscope manipulator. The control strategy solves problems of kinematics transformation on consistency principle, intra-operative re-mapping and tremor attenuation in real-time. The kinematics model of slave instrument manipulators is established, and the master–slave control method in Cartesian space is proposed. Intra-operative re-mapping and real-time tremor attenuation algorithms are also proposed as auxiliary functions to improve surgical robot’s performance. The proposed methods are verified by respective experiments. Finally, animal experiment is performed to verify the correctness and efficiency of the control strategy in this research.

Keywords:

• Surgical robot
• minimally invasive surgery
• master–slave control
• Cartesian space
• tremor attenuation

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Funding

This work was supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (‘863 Program’) (Grant No. 2012AA041601), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.61305139), Self-Planned Task (No. SKLRS201406B) of State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System (HIT), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. HIT. NSRIF. 2013052).