Stabilization for an ear surgical device using force feedback and vision-based motion compensation

The auto or semi-auto “office-based surgical device” is a kind of device which aims to shift the conventional surgical procedures from the operating room to the confines of the doctor's/surgeon's office as well as to assist the surgeons to carry out the surgeries automatically or semi-automatically. In this paper, an office-based surgical device suitable for patients with Otitis Media with Effusion is introduced. Due to its office-based design, it is not possible to subject the patient to general anesthesia (i.e. the patient is awake). To ensure a high success rate and safety, it is very important that the relative motion and the contact force between the tool set of the device and the tympanic membrane can be stabilized. To this end, a control scheme using force feedback with vision-based motion compensation is proposed, implemented and tested in a mock-up system. The results show that the proposed controller can achieve much better performance than a pure force feedback controller, which helps the system to stabilize the relative motion indirectly and maintain the contact force precisely.