The human machine interface implementation for the robot assisted endoscopic surgery system

This paper describes a robot-assisted endoscopic surgery system. The surgeon who stays outside the operating room controls the robot in master-slave way to accomplish the surgery. Thus, the performance of the human-machine interface between the surgical robot and the surgeon is very important for the quality of the surgery. According to the characteristics of the endoscopic surgery, we adopted commercially available, standard joystick as the candidate human-machine interactive device (HMID) of this robot-assisted surgery system. After comparing the joystick to the previous HMID (keyboard) in four different control modes, joystick-position mode was selected as the best human-machine interface of our system. In the implementation of this master-slave control, safety consideration was highlighted because of its importance. The human model experiment shows this system's advantages and disadvantages to the original direct surgery. Additionally, a method is proposed to easily achieve the balance between real-time performance and system stability.