A Multilateral Impedance-Controlled System For Haptics-Enabled Surgical Training And Cooperation In Beating-Heart Surgery

In this paper, an impedance-controlled multi-master/single-slave telerobotic system is developed for haptics-enabled surgical training and cooperation in beating-heart surgery. This system not only can enable automatically motion compensation for the beating heart’s motion as well as non-oscillatory force feedback to the human operators but can also enable training and cooperation for multiple users. A multi-user shared control architecture is developed, and a multilateral impedance-controlled strategy is employed for this architecture. The desired objectives of the proposed system are a) providing position guidance to the trainees during training procedure, b) providing force feedback to all human operators (trainer and trainees) regardless of their levels of authority over the slave robot, c) motion compensation for the heart’s motion, and d) reflecting only the non-oscillatory force portion of the slave-heart tissue interaction force to all human operators. To this end, virtual fixtures and a dominance factor are introduced, and a reference impedance model with adjusted parameters is designed for each master or slave robot. The proposed impedance-based control methodology is evaluated experimentally. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method could be used for surgical training and cooperation in beatingheart surgery by providing appropriate position guidance and environmental force feedback to the human operators.