Cooperative teleoperation with projection-based force reflection for MIS

Implementation of haptic feedback in minimally invasive surgical teleoperator systems may lead to improved performance in many common surgical procedures; however, most of the currently available surgical teleoperators do not provide force feedback, mainly because of the associated stability issues. In this paper, we study the effect of a special type of force reflection algorithms, called projection-based force reflection (PBFR) algorithms, on the stability and performance of a dual-arm haptics-enabled teleoperator system for minimally-invasive surgical applications. In particular, the teleoperator system´s performance is experimentally evaluated in three common tasks, which are knot tightening, pegboard transfer, and object manipulation, in the presence of negligible as well as non-negligible communication delays. The results obtained indicate that, in almost all cases, the PBFR algorithms demonstrate statistically significant improvement of performance in comparison with conventional direct force feedback.