Enhanced position-force tracking of time-delayed teleoperation for robotic-assisted surgery

The advance of minimally invasive surgery has been empowered by new medical/surgical robotic systems towards achieving less invasiveness, smaller or even no scars. Wireless communication possesses great potential to be utilized in miniaturized surgical robotic system. However time delay is inevitably introduced in the control loop which causes stability issues for robotic-assisted surgeries. Wave variable based teleoperation structure provides stable force reflecting teleoperation performance but with both position and force tracking performance compromised due to conservative passivity condition. Recently, we proposed a new wave variable compensated structure to improve position and force tracking performance together with energy reservoir based regulators for stability purpose. In this paper, different energy reservoir based regulators are proposed with consideration of passivity of master and slave system to avoid uncertain compensated wave variables. Experiments are designed to evaluate the performance of proposed structure in comparison with traditional wave variable structure. Quantitative analyses of the obtained results justify the efficiency of proposed method.