Towards Evaluating the User Comfort and Experience of a Novel Steerable Drilling Robotic System in Pedicle Screw Fixation Procedures: A User Study

Aiming at developing a safe, intuitive, and collaborative steerable drilling robotic system for pedicle screw fixation procedures, in this paper, we leverage our recently developed steerable drilling robotic framework, and developed a collaborative drilling mode to control this system. In this control mode, first a user positions a concentric tube steerable drilling robot (CT-SDR) in the workspace and aligns it based on a preplanned trajectory. Next, the CT-SDR is directly controlled by the user through an admittance mode to perform a drilling procedure and creating a J-shape tunnel. To evaluate the user comfort and intuitiveness of the drilling procedure using this system and the proposed control interface, we performed a user study with 11 subjects, who had no prior experience in using this system. The results of this study were analyzed using various qualitative and quantitative metrics.