A haptic system for robotic assisted spine surgery

This paper deals with the problem of guiding an operator during the execution of a 5 degrees of freedom surgical teleoperation task. The work is focused on the feasibility of a spine surgery telerobotic system, made up of a haptic master, a slave robot, an optical tracking device and a main control unit. With this system, the surgeon performs a drilling operation by using a telerobotic device, being guided by haptic feedback: as soon as the vertebra moves, the tracking device measures vertebra pose and a proper force is exerted on the operator's hand to let him/her adjust surgical tool position and orientation. Moreover, the haptic master produces the force feedback related to the teleoperation. The paper is focused on the design and implementation of this haptic system, with particular reference to control system architecture. Finally, some experimental results are presented