Tele-operation and simulation for a new surgical robot design

Abstract

Femur fracture is a frequently occurred injury and usually treated by surgeries. However, the treatment of femur fracture exhibits many problems such as excessive radiation exposure to both surgeons and patients and mal-alignment in reduction. In order to overcome these problems, robot-assisted reduction surgery has been researched in recent years. One hybrid robot is introduced in this paper for femur fracture reduction. In order to train the surgeon for pre-operative planning or for intra-operative manipulation, we developed a tele-operation and simulation system for the newly developed hybrid robot. In this system, we construct the virtual hybrid robot by V-Realm Builder 2.0 based on VRML language, use MATLAB Simulink and the virtual reality toolbox to build the simulation model, and tele-operation of the virtual hybrid robot is implemented using the Phantom haptic interface. The virtual system presented in this paper creates a realistic environment for demonstration and provides facilities for good quality rendering. The tele-operation system shows that it is convenient and powerful in defining a 3D path. The approach utilized in this paper can also be used to study other types of robot. © 2011 CAD Solutions, LLC.