Abstract
Remote surgery has a great potential to improve the access to health care and the quality of the emergency medical care. However, the safety of remote surgery cannot be guaranteed due to the communication delay between the master site and the slave site. The study aim to develop a control scheme for ensuring the safety of remote surgery. We propose a hybrid control of rate control and admittance control wherein the contact force between the surgical instrument and objects is controlled to be less than the desired upper bound. The proposed controller switches rate control and admittance control in a stable manner based on the contact force. The proposed scheme was tested through simulations and experimentally in a 1 degree-of-freedom setup. The results showed that the proposed system successfully controlled the contact force in a stable manner without an unfavorable behavior.
