Design and control of tele matched surgery robot
Abstract In the present paper, we develop a tele matched surgery robot for a precise force reflection, and stable and intuitive operation. The term 'tele matched' means that the motions of master and slave robots are matched precisely by bilateral teleoperation. The developed tele matched surgery robot has three main features: (1) Coupling forces among joints of slave end effector are removed. (2) Power transmission mechanism of slave robot is designed suitable enough for torque estimation without a torque sensor. (3) The motion of each joint of master robot precisely matches to that of slave robot. Consequently, as the key contributions of this paper, a new tendon mechanism is designed to remove the coupling forces, a torque estimation scheme is used to estimate the external forces without using any physical sensors, and by the motion matching between the master and slave robots, a surgeon can operate the slave motion by intuitively controlling the master device. The effectiveness of the developed robot is verified through a number of experiments.