Design of a haptic master interface for robotically assisted vitreo-retinal eye surgery

Reduced dexterity and an unergonomic body posture are two of the shortcomings for the surgeon while performing conventional minimally invasive surgery or vitreo-retinal eye surgery. With a master-muslave system these inconveniences during ophthalmic surgery can be overcome. To gain insight in the requirements for the master device a master/slave setup with 1 degree of freedom and high resolution position and force measurement is realized. The first part of the paper is about the design of this setup. The design of a haptic interface as part of the master device, the preliminary results and future work are discussed in the second part of this paper.