The application of telerobotic technology to minimally invasive surgery has seen increased interest over the last decade. Patients benefit from reduced trauma and recovery time, as tools enter the body through 1cm or smaller ports. Surgeons guide the tiny dexterous robotic instruments with natural hand motions, while seated comfortably at a console next to the patient. Despite its significant potential, adoption of this technology continues to be hindered by the surgeon's inability to touch and feel the surgical site. While visual feedback is sufficient to guide precise motions, the sense of touch is necessary for delicate tasks such as palpation and suturing of diseased or weak tissue. The current lack of this haptic feedback can be traced to the master-slave control strategies inherited from traditional robotics. Fortunately, recent ideas focusing on human-centered teleoperative control are showing great promise. In this project the PI will adopt this approach to develop a telerobotic surgery testbed that incorporates novel sensors and control algorithms based on a human-centered paradigm, which enable it to provide high fidelity haptic feedback during the performance of real tasks such as suturing, thereby assuring the surgeon's accurate perception of the surgical site. The two-handed testbed will be built on state-of-the-art hardware pledged by Intuitive Surgical Inc (makers of the da Vinci telerobotic surgery system and leaders in the field), and will use a networked open architecture to facilitate sensorization, algorithm development, and future interoperability. The new control algorithms will refine, extend and integrate into the surgical application several unique concepts that have each shown promise on simple systems: wave variables will overcome the destabilizing effects of communication delays, stably incorporating high frequency force feedback; model-based cancellation of induced motion will allow estimation of the user's intention and achieve smooth, precise slave commands; acceleration matching will shape the feedback to yield one-to-one force feedback at low frequency and one-to-one acceleration feedback at high frequency; and observation of the user state via grip force levels will allow appropriate modulation of the feedback. Coordination with Stanford surgeons will ensure that control algorithms are clinically applicable, well tested, and beneficial to surgery erformance.
Broader Impacts: The outcomes of this project will allow surgeons to perform procedures with greater sensitivity and enable new minimally invasive procedures, reducing patient trauma and health care costs. Because the PI will employ standard hardware and surgical tasks, the control improvements should directly influence future designs and quickly lead to clinical testing and adoption by industry. The results will also be shared with the academic research community, including development software and operating system support, in the hopes of creating a standardized testing facility for telerobotic surgery. Integration of the proposed research with teaching activities and undergraduate mentoring will be carried out via a new graduate telerobotics course with multimedia content that brings classroom students into the research environment and allows research students to participate in teaching, and a freshman robotics seminar whose purpose is to expose incoming students to science and engineering, encourage their involvement in research, and provide mentorship especially to women and minorities.
