Natural Human–Robot Interaction for Vascular Interventional Surgery: Design and Evaluation of a Leader Device With Haptic Feedback

Robot-assisted vascular interventional surgery is a hot topic in the interdisciplinary field of medical science and engineering, it has important research significance. Compared with traditional manual operation, it shows obvious advantages, such as avoiding the radiation exposure to the interventionist, reducing the workload of the interventionist, improving the precision of the operation, and guaranteeing the safety of the operation. However, the human–robot interaction ability has always been a major challenge that cannot be ignored. In this article, we designed and developed a leader device that enables the interventionists to experience the state of surgical instruments naturally and realistically when operating it, as if they were operating actual surgical instruments. The innovations can be summarized as follows: the structure of the leader device is highly consistent with the interventionist’s operating habit, which greatly reduces the interventionist’s operating difficulty. Haptic feedback in both translational direction and circumferential direction is achieved to provide haptic guidance to the interventionists and improve their surgical presence. The leader device is optimized in both structural design and functional realization compared to existing leader devices. This study has great potential in improving human-robot interaction ability, and could provide a reference for the design and evaluation of the leader device.