Teleoperated Surgical Robot with Adaptive Interactive Control Architecture for Tissue Identification

The remote perception of teleoperated surgical robotics has been a critical issue for surgeons in fulfilling their remote manipulation tasks. In this article, an adaptive teleoperation control framework is proposed. It provides a physical human-robot interaction interface to enhance the ability of the operator to intuitively perceive the material properties of remote objects. The recursive least square (RLS) is adopted to estimate the required human hand stiffness that the operator can achieve to compensate for the contact force. Based on the estimated stiffness, a force feedback controller is designed to avoid the induced motion and to convey the haptic information of the slave side. The passivity of the proposed teleoperation system is ensured by the virtual energy tank. A stable contact test validated that the proposed method achieved stable contact between the slave robot and the hard environment while ensuring the transparency of the force feedback. A series of human subject experiments was conducted to empirically verify that the proposed teleoperation framework can provide a more smooth, dexterous, and intuitive user experience with a more accurate perception of the mechanical property of the interacted material on the slave side, compared to the baseline method. After the experiment, the design idea about the force feedback controller of the bilateral teleoperation is discussed.