Evaluation of audio and haptic realism of a robotic drilling simulator for scientific experiments

抄録

Organoids research involved milling the skull of a mouse for cranial window implantation, which is difficult as the skull is non-uniformly thin. To improve the surgical success, VR simulator could replace live mouse specimen as a surgical platform for training or robot control test. Moreover, there are attempts to automate bone milling with robot control using audio and milling force data. This motivates the generation of realistic audio and haptics with a VR simulator. In this work we develop a simulator that generates force information for two purposes, namely haptics and to modulate drilling audio. We conduct a face validation study by recruiting subjects to operate the simulator and compare it to the actual scenario. The subjects subjectively scored the realism of our simulator’s audio and haptic above an average score of 7.3/10 and 6.5/10. The utility of these stimuli was also rated highly (9.1/10), indicative of their importance in making judgements when operating the simulator.