Telerobotic systems are revolutionizing minimally invasive surgery (MIS), giving the surgeon complete control over precise dexterous movements of tiny robotic instruments. Such 'surgery-by-wire' approaches also create unique opportunities for simulation and training, as the surgeon operates at a computer-mediated haptic console. Possible extensions include offline training in simulated environm...

A new class of telerobotic applications is making its way into research laboratories, fine arts or science museums, and industrial installations. Virtual laboratories and remote equipment maintenance are examples of these applications, which are built exploiting distributed computing systems and Internet technologies. Distributed computing technologies provide several advantages to telerobotic ...

This paper aimed to explore whether human beings can understand gestures produced by telepresence robots. If it were the case, they can derive meaning conveyed in telerobotic gestures when processing spatial information. We conducted two experiments over Skype in the present study. Participants were presented with a robotic interface that had arms, which were teleoperated by an experimenter. Th...

The Universities Space Automation and Robotics Consortium (USARC) was established to promote research into robotics and telerobotics for remote applications. An important part of the work of the Consortium has been the design and implementation of the Telerobotic Construction Set (TCS), which enables the building of modular telerobotic networks. On-line and oo-line performance analyses are inte...

Session management of a telerobotic operation is an important aspect which has not been adequately addressed. This paper describes work performed by the Universities Space Automation/Robotics Consortium (USARC) which allows dynamic connguration and monitoring of a telerobotic system which is distributed over a wide-area network. The Telerobotic Session Manager (TSM) allows the session manager t...

Sliding mode control has been used extensively in robotics to cope with parameters uncertainty, model perturbations and system disturbance. Bilateral robotic teleoperators are often required to provide a haptic interaction in telerobotic applications in which human kinesthetic sense is stimulated locally by remote environment. The paper deals with bilateral control for a force-reflection master...

We discuss the concept of ultrasound imaging at a distance by presenting the evaluation of a customized, lightweight, human-safe robotic arm for low-force, long-distance, telerobotic ultrasonography. We undertook intercity and trans-Atlantic telerobotic ultrasound simulation from master stations located in New York, New York and Munich, Germany, and imaged a phantom and a human volunteer locate...

Within the area of telerobotic surgery no standardized means of surgically relevant performance evaluation has been established. The Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS) program provides a set of standardized tasks that are considered the “gold standard” in surgical skill assessment. We present a methodology for using on...