Background
Haptic feedback has been proven to play a key role in enhancing the performance of teleoperated medical procedures. However, due to safety issues, commercially‐available medical robots do not currently provide the clinician with haptic feedback.
Methods
This work presents the experimental evaluation of a teleoperation system for robot‐assisted medical procedures able to provide magnified haptic feedback to the clinician. Forces registered at the operating table are magnified and provided to the clinician through a 7‐DoF haptic interface. The same interface is also used to control the motion of a 6‐DoF slave robotic manipulator. The safety of the system is guaranteed by a time‐domain passivity‐based control algorithm.
Results
Two experiments were carried out on stiffness discrimination (during palpation and needle insertion) and one experiment on needle guidance.
Conclusions
Our haptic‐enabled teleoperation system improved the performance with respect to direct hand interaction of 80%, 306%, and 27% in stiffness discrimination through palpation, stiffness discrimination during needle insertion, and guidance, respectively.