A hands-on-robot for accurate placement of pedicle screws

Abstract

This paper presents a novel system for accurate placement of pedicle screws. The system consists of a new light-weight (<10 kg), kinematically redundant, and fully torque controlled robot. Additionally, the pose of the robot tool-center point is tracked by an optical navigation system, serving as an external reference source. Therefore, it is possible to measure and to compensate deviations between the intraoperative and the preoperatively planned pose. The robotic arm itself is impedance controlled. This allows for a new intuitive manmachine-interface as the joint units are equipped with torque sensors: the robot can be moved just by pulling/pushing its structure. The surgeon has full control of the robot at every step of the intervention. The hand-eye-coordination problems known from manual pedicle screw placement can be omitted.

Prototypic Force Feedback Instrument for Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery

“…This chapter focuses on the development of actuated and sensor integrated forceps as well as on the surgeon input console and on sensory substitution approaches for providing haptic feedback. Details on the development of the surgical robot can be found in (Ortmaier et al, 2006; DLR -German Aerospace Center, Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, 2007).…”

“…As shown in Figure 3 and described in Section 2 the surgical instrument shown in Figure 6 is carried by the DLR KineMedic ® (Ortmaier et al, 2006; DLR -German Aerospace Center, Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, 2007) surgical manipulator arm for MIRS applications. The robot is mechanically, electrically, and electronically interconnected to the propulsion unit of the instrument (proximal part, see Section 4.1).…”

Motion Tracking for Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery

“…The design of the KineMedic robot is based on the method of soft robotics pursued at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, DLR, which leads to robotic systems such as the DLR light-weight robot , which are light-weight, flexible and modular, and still maintain a high degree of dynamics and accuracy. Based on these techniques, the newly designed KineMedic robot has been developed as a joint partnership of DLR and BrainLab AG (Heimstetten, Germany), focussing on the demands of surgery (Ortmaier et al, 2006). The KineMedic surgical robot (see prototype in Fig.…”

“…The daVinci™system is an endoscopic surgerical robotic system which has been available for a few years (Guthart & Salisbury, 2000). The newly designed DLR surgical KineMedic robot (Ortmaier et al, 2006) will be able to to perform these tasks as well and adds a number of improvements (cf. section 3.4.…”

“…The degree of image motion correction has to be performed in accordance to motion compensation of the surgical instrument, which requires the system to maintain a high degree of consistency in the motion compensation strategy. Further investigations will involve the the new KineMedic robot (Ortmaier et al, 2006), which provides a considerably higher degree of accuracy and dynamics than existing medical robotic systems, which is required for the task of motion compensation of the beating heart.…”