Simulation and control of a multi-DOF laparoscopic tele-surgery system in virtual reality

Abstract

A tele-surgery system with force feedback is completely modeled in the MATLAB-Simulink software. The virtual rapid robot prototyping is used to import the SolidWorks models of the master and slave robots to MATLAB-SimMechanics. This method provides us with the 3D vision of the robot performance in the virtual reality environment. Each robot has 4- DOF in motion and is equipped with a 6-DOF force/torque sensor. A proper damping controller is designed in order to provide the sense of real surgery. This method uses the differences between the measured forces in master and slave sensors in order to generate the velocity command for the master actuators. To model the behavior of the surgeon hand in the real operation, a variable force/torque is applied to the tool handle and the reaction of the system is studied in the virtual reality environment. It can be claimed from the results that this method acceptably provides the situation of a real surgery for a multi-DOF robotic surgery system.