A novel smart surgical robotic system with eye-hand coordination for surgical assistance

Remote operation is commonly used in modern robotic assisted surgery. A surgeon sits beside the console to operate an input device to control the slave robotic instrument performing tissue manipulation, while guided by visual feedback. Most people have high more dexterity on one hand than in the other. Humans prefer to use their more dexterous hand to do important tasks, such as holding a needle for suturing, while the other hand is used to assist. However, surgeons need to perform important task using both hands on a surgery. For example, they sometimes need use left hand to hold scalpels or needles for vital tissue intervention even if they are right-handed. This paper presents a novel smart surgical robotic system for surgical application. The robotic system is composed of two slave arms and two visual modules. Each slave arm consists of a 8 degree of freedom dexterous manipulator. Each visual module is composed of a 3 DOF manipulator and a flexible endoscope. The two slave arms and the two vision modules are closely located in a rectangular frame. Two phantom Omnis are used for tele-control of the two slave arms for tissue manipulation. The correspondence between the phantom Omnis and the slave arms could be swapped depending on the surgical requirement. Therefore, the user could always use the most dexterous hand for vital tasks. The two visual modules, located in the front and the back of the two slave arms respectively are used for visual feedback. Based on the different correspondence between the master and the slave arms, only one visual module will be selected to show its image in a monitor. As a result, the operator could always drive the slave arms for tissue manipulation with good eye-hand coordination. The preliminary experiment shows that the surgical robotic system is adequate.