Navigation Graphics to Coordinate the Human and Robot Behavior for Handheld Robot Positioning

The paper demonstrated a handheld surgical robot system in assisting the surgeon to create a tunnel during pedicle screw fixation. The robot is aimed at stabilizing the drill during penetrating the surface of a vertebra and reducing the drill drifting from the entry point caused by involuntary tremor. The handheld robot is consisted of a miniature hexapod platform and its master handle control was designed to cooperate with the 6-DOF parallel slave robot. Design of the human machine interface for visual information in the aspect of human robot cooperation has been investigated. We found that a handheld robot possesses a unique feature of the slave on the master, and requires an appropriate graphics interface which is different from the traditional design in navigation systems. Experimental results showed that the proposed new navigation graphics was effective to improve the overall accuracy and consumed time for positioning the drill to target the planned trajectory.