Abstract
Surgical robots have undergone considerable improvement by only mechanical performance in recent years, but the intuitive operability has not been quantitatively evaluated. This paper presents the brain activity measurement method to determine intuitive operability to design a robot with intuitive operability. The objective of this paper is to validate that the specific brain area which is the intraparietal sulcus activates if the user controls the slave manipulator positioned intuitively.
In the experiments, while subjects controlled the hand controller to position the tip of the virtual slave manipulator on the target in the surgical simulator, we measured the brain activity through the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (f-NIRS). We carried out the experiment a number of times with the virtual slave manipulator configured in a variety of ways. The results show that the brain activated significantly with the specific slave manipulator configured such that the angles matched the human body. We conclude that the how strongly human feels the manipulator belongs to his body affects hand-eye coordination, which is related to visual and somatic sense feedback.
