An Energy-Based Approach for n-d.o.f. Passive Dual-User Haptic Training Systems

Abstract

This paper introduces a dual-user training system whose design is based on an energetic approach. This kind of system is useful for supervised hands-on training where a trainer interacts with a trainee through two haptic devices, in order to practice on a manual task performed on a virtual or teleoperated robot (for example for an MIS task in a surgical context). This paper details the proof of stability of an Energy Shared Control (ESC) architecture we previously introduced for one degree of freedom (d.o.f.) devices. An extension to multiple degrees of freedom is proposed, along with an enhanced version of the Adaptive Authority Adjustment (AAA) function. Experiments are carried out with 3 d.o.f. haptic devices in free motion as well as in contact contexts in order to show the relevance of this architecture.

Review of Advanced Medical Telerobots

“…For addressing this issue advance and lightweight signal processing modules such as Kalman filter [11] and advanced control modules such as model predictive control [202] have been suggested in the literature and sometimes are fused with other modalities such as electrocardiograms (ECG) to track, predict and compensate for the phase lag [11,[199][200][201][202][203][204][205]. This task is a form of shared autonomy (see Section 3.2) using which robots can utilize computer vision to compensate for the repetitive motions [12,199,203,[206][207][208]. This will significantly increase the accuracy of the operation since it significantly reduces the mental, cognitive, and physical load on the surgeons during operation [10,11,200,[209][210][211][212].…”

“…In an opposite scenario, using guiding virtual fixture telerobotic systems can assign novice surgeons to converge to a desirable trajectory or path (which can be annotated preoperatively by expert surgeons) [68][69][70][71]118,216,217]. This technology is usually used under training environments (not during actual surgeries) when novice trainee surgeons practice surgery with robots on highly structured and clean surgical training phantoms mimicking an actual surgical site and allowing the implementation of guiding virtual fixtures for helping trainees with learning and developing a motor task [136,163,206,208,218].…”

“…An example for medical application is tele-mirror-rehabilitation when a human therapist holding the first robot works with a remote patient holding the second robot with her/his left hand and the third robot with her/his right hand (in a mirrored fashion) to provide kinesthetic mirror rehabilitation exercises [247,253,254]. As another example, the same structure can be used for an expert-in-the-loop (EIL) surgical training mechanism to train a novice surgeon on how to conduct tasks such as telesurgery [206,208].…”

“…Multi-leader-single-follower (ML/SF) system grants the ability for multiple operators to command one single follower robot through manipulation of their associated leader robot and fusion of their motion command to control the follower robot [218,[230][231][232][255][256][257]. Applications of these systems can be seen in various forms such as EIL multi-robot rehabilitation [4,247,253,254,[258][259][260][261][262][263][264][265][266][267], collaborative surgery [163,206,237,268] and surgical training [4,163,206,208,258,[260][261][262][263][264][265][266][267][268]. More specifically, using this topology, multiple surgeons can share the control of a single follower robotic system (details of medical autonomy are given in Section 3.2 of this paper).…”

“…Besides, the expert trajectory has been used to generate a guiding force field at the trainee's robot so that the trainee can develop the needed spatial and visuospatial mapping based on the kinesthetic guidance from the expert side. This is called robot-mediated hand-over-hand training [64,206,208,258,278].…”