Preoperative planning simulator with haptic feedback for Raven-II surgical robotics platform

In this research we present a Preoperative Robotic Surgery Simulator platform as a means of training for Raven-II Surgical system. The simulator employs PHANTOM Omni (now Geomagic® Touch™) as a master device to control the arms of the 3D simulated model of Raven-II in virtual environment. The earlier simulators for Raven-II were built primarily to work over Debian-based Linux Operating Systems. This is the first attempt towards development of a simulator in MATLAB which, being a cross platform application, allows the accessibility of the simulator to a broader community of surgeons and researchers. The simulator is designed to provide the haptic feedback to the user which results in a realistic emulation of surgery environment. Other key features include opening and closing of the surgical tool using pen buttons of PHANTOM Omni and a `freeflow' feature with which a surgeon can willingly pause the motion of surgical robot to adjust the position of input device as per the requirement. The simulator was successfully built and tested in MATLAB and the results from the simulation satisfactorily verified the efficacy of the proposed system.