Cooperative Teleoperation With Projection-Based Force Reflection for MIS

Implementation of haptic feedback in minimally invasive surgical teleoperator systems may lead to improved performance in many common surgical procedures; however, most of the currently available surgical teleoperators do not provide force feedback, mainly because of the associated stability issues. In this paper, we study the effect of a special type of the force reflection algorithms, called projection-based force reflection (PBFR) algorithms, on the stability and performance of a dual-arm haptic-enabled teleoperator system for minimally invasive surgical applications. The performance of different algorithms is experimentally compared in the presence of negligible as well as nonnegligible communication delays. In particular, the teleoperator system's performance is experimentally evaluated in three common surgical tasks, which are knot tightening, pegboard transfer, and object manipulation. The results obtained indicate that, in almost all cases, the PBFR algorithms demonstrate statistically significant improvement of performance in comparison with the conventional direct force feedback.