Virtual-Fixture-Based Osteotomy Shared Control: A Framework for Human-Robot Shared Surgical Osteotomy Manipulation

Human-robot shared control is an effective approach to enhancing the efficiency of surgical operations, as it integrates the strengths of both humans and robots. The use of conventional robot-assisted surgery, where the surgeon is solely responsible for manipulation, is limited when it comes to complex surgical procedures that require real-time manipulations such as mandibular angle split osteotomy and decompressive laminectomy. With the rising demands of manipulation, we proposed a shared control framework which automates surgical subtasks like milling-path following. These subtasks have demands on contact control, orientation control, and positional control. The robot provides hands-on hapic transparency and milling-path control with a virtual-fixture-based hybrid force/position methods simultaneously in real-time. The hybrid task’s decomposition method is derived from Frenet-Serret frames and can be adaptive to patients’ movement. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated on a 7 DOF manipulator. Results of the lateral positions/force indicated that with the osteotomy shared control framework, lateral positional errors and transparent force errors can be constrained within 0.7mm and 1.35 N (2.52 N considering noises), which is superior to the average deviation of surgeons with free hand (up to 5.0 mm) and the extra payloads to hands due to weight (around 10.0 N).