A Noble Bilateral Teleoperation System for Human Guided Spinal Fusion

In order to provide improved convenience for a surgeon in spinal fusion surgery, a robot system should i) closely engage in surgeon´s operation using an end effector, and ii) protect the surgeon from being exposed to harmful radiation due to repeated shootings of fluoroscope. This paper proposes a bilateral teleoperation system for spinal fusion, BiTESS-II, to accomplish the goals. We developed an end effector that can substitute the surgeon´s manual operation and a novel closed-loop type slave robot that can exert strong reaction force to complete gimleting and screwing tasks. Master devices are used to control the position and orientation of the slave robot and to generate haptic information identical to that of the slave side. A novel force reflection method without force sensors allowed to design the end effector simple and light. BiTESS-II is among the first human guided teleoperation system for spinal fusion with an adequate end effector. The performance of the BiTESS-II was verified by experiments.