Multimodal haptic interface for surgical robotics

The coming years will see a rapid development of telemanipulators for robotic surgery. These systems will open up new possibilities in surgery. Patient safety and acceptance among surgeons are two key issues in this context. We believe that haptic feedback at the console will be an essential feature for both, increased safety and acceptance among surgeons. We aim at giving the surgeon the feeling that he or she is directly operating with his/her own hands on the patient´s body. For this, multimodal haptic feedback will be necessary, i.e. the merging of force-feedback, temperature sensing, pressure sensing, and texture rendering, in addition to an ergonomic design of the console itself. We will present some preliminary designs of such systems which are currently being developed in the framework of several projects.