Development of multi degrees-of-freedom bilateral forceps robot system using FPGA

In recent days, minimally invasive surgery by using endoscope has spread and robots that support endoscopic surgery are being focused on. However, existing surgery robots could not transmit information of tactile sensation to operators. To improve the safety of robotic surgery, it is required to transmit the tactile sensation to the operator. To attain that need, a teleoperation method called bilateral has developed and we have achieved to transmit keen tactile sensation with one degree-of-freedom forceps robots. In this paper, multi degrees-of-freedom bilateral forceps robot system will be developed to make surgery robot adaptable to actual situation of the surgery. In bilateral teleoperation of multi degrees-of-freedom robots, environmental information of master and slave should be exchanged in common coordinates. In this paper, mode coordinates is used as common coordinates. Mode coordinates are closely related to the motion of the robot. Method to decouple the mechanical interference on mode coordinate is proposed. The paper also proposes a controller implemented on FPGA to achieve short processing time and hard-realtime control. As a result, multi-degrees-of freedom force feedback is attained. The experimental results show the viability of the proposed method.