Development of image servo tracking robot for the surgical space positioning system

This paper presents the development of image servo-tracking robot, which is used for the surgical space position systems. The proposed surgical navigation robot plays an important role to the computer aided surgery (CAS), since it provides the patient's space coordinate during surgical navigation stage in real-time. Especially, the proposed active image servo-tracking based surgical navigation robot can track the surgical marker to extend the navigation space automatically. The proposed surgical navigation robot system consists of the in-lab design dual-axis eye-in-hand robot (EIHR), digital signal processor (DSP) based EIHR motion controller, image servo-tracking controller and space positioning software module. Especially, the image recognition module, fuzzy membership functions and fuzzy rules are constructed as the EIHR intelligent motion controller to dynamically track the surgical marker. Finally, the EIHR prototype had been finished, and the experiment results showed that proposed EIHR achieved 1.7 mm position error within 500 mm operation range. ? 2004 IEEE.