Command interface and driving strategy for a voice activated en-doscope positioning arm

A command and control interface for intraoperative endoscope positioning must be intuitive, simple, intrinsically safe and reliable. Voice commands are widely used in commercial and experimental robotic-assisted remote-controlled surgical systems and must comply with those requirements. This paper presents a design proposal and implementation of an integrated voice-activated control interface as well as its associated command strategy. It comprises an isolated word speech recognition module based on the IBM SMAPI programming library, a task management state machine and a RS232 communication module.