Needle Intervention Robot-Assisted Driving System with Augmented Haptic Force Feedback Facility

Manual needle intervention into brain can be highly risky since needle is senseless. Such sophisticated task can only be securely performed either by experienced surgeons or through augmented feeling. Robot-assisted needle intervention is highly preferable because of its capability in augmented haptic force feedback. This research presents novel table-mounted 4-DOFs surgical robot on slave side to achieve required position and orientation, through which the surgical needle can be inserted and extracted with augmented force feedback facility. Surgical results in beef and chicken are slightly different due to the difference in tissue physical properties. The generated force obtained in beef tissue is larger than that in chicken tissue. The experimental results verify that the proposed needle intervention system with augmented haptic force feedback brings significant advancement in robotic-assisted surgical procedure. In addition, the system is able to respond according to the stiffness of experimental sample.