Telesurgery and Surgical Simulation: Haptic Interfaces to Real and Virtual Surgical Environments

In this paper, telesurgery and surgical simulation are introduced as parallel research problems of haptic interfacing to real and virtual surgical environments. The analytical tools of systems and control theory and robotics are used to address several research problems in these areas. The discussion on telesurgery is centered around the UC Berkeley/UC San Francisco Laparoscopic Telesurgical Workstation, focusing on the design of the system and high fidelity teleoperation controller design. Second part of the paper describes a testbed developed at the San Francisco, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara campuses of the University of California for research in understanding, assessing, and training surgical skills. The testbed includes virtual environments for training perceptual motor skills, spatial skills, and critical steps of surgical procedures. Within this context, a novel method to interface with deformable objects addressing the issues resulting from the difference between the haptic and deformable model simulation update rates is presented.