Sensory Safety Control of Robotic Flexible Laparoscope for Minimally Invasive Surgery

Laparoscopic surgery remains a challenging procedure. Laparoscopic surgery is a kind of minimally invasive surgery. In addition to the physician performing the surgery, another assistant is required to manipulate the laparoscope. This requires well trained and collaborative actions between the surgeon and the assistant. Therefore, robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery has been introduced due to their stable, easy to operate, and noise removal characteristics. However, safety issues of robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery have to be studied and discussed. We use a Robotic Flexible Laparoscopic System (RFLS) to explore for three aspects: Contact, Fine Tune, and Safety Operation. First of all, the surgeon cannot see outside the field of view of the laparoscope. When the distal of the laparoscope contacts with surgical instruments or tissue, the system we propose can automatically adjust the weighting and displays a red warning line on the monitor. An-other aspect is that the surgeon has difficulty to perform the fine tune due to the time delay of the remote control. We propose the Motion Split function to record the trajectory of the head motion and split it into small segments so that the surgeon can operate the system delicately. Lastly, the user cannot focus on the monitor because the system is controlled by the surgeon’s head movement. Therefore, we propose an Autonomous Tracking System that identifies surgical instruments and moves the laparoscope to the preferred circle. Experimental results show that the laparoscope automatically avoids unnecessary contact above 17g/cm^2. The surgeon can fine tune the laparoscope and the error is less than 0.1 degrees. Besides, the tracking system can accurately and stably move to the target within 1.5 settling time.