Development of an interactive surgical robot training system

Nowadays, more robots have been introduced for medical applications, including surgery, rehabilitation, walking assistance, among others. It thus motivates us to develop a robot surgical system that can provide assistance for the surgeons during surgery. As a continuing research for building such a system, this paper focuses on the development of its training system, including a realistic simulator and experimental platform. To achieve more precise control and higher safety during surgery, we gather both position and force information, and propose making use of the force feedback for developing virtual fixtures as an assistive tool during surgery emulation and thus design an interactive VR-based system that can closely emulate the surgical environment. Virtual fixtures intended for guidance and restriction are both designed to generate appropriate force for guidance or protection according to different task requirements. An experimental platform is developed to validate this assistive surgical robot training system. For demonstration, experiments based on the treatment of soft tissue in the abdominal cavity are conducted. The experimental results show that the VFs serving as the assistive tool are effective, implicating the proposed system is a step further toward its testing on a real surgical robot platform.