Abstract
Very fine motion is required in eye surgery, more specifically, in vitreoretinal surgery, and several surgical robotic systems have been developed to assist surgeons by filtering hand tremor and improving motion resolution. However, due to human-oriented problems, the precision and safety of robotic surgery are not sufficient. In this study, we propose two methods to implement motion constraints and automatic guidance to a master-slave microsurgical robotic system. The motion constraint method limits the motion range of the surgical robot by changing the motion-scaling ratio according to the change of distance between the tip of the robotic instrument and the target. In contrast, the auto-guidance method changes the direction of the robotic motion so that the tip of the robotic instrument approaches toward the target. We conducted experiments to elucidate the feasibility of the proposed methods, and the results showed that both methods had potential to improve precision and safety.
