Enhancement of human operator's perceptual sensitivity for telesurgical systems via polytopic system approach

A suturing including knot tying is one of the more difficult operations to learn in telesurgical systems. Apprentice surgeons commonly suffer from suture breakage or knot failure. The difficulty, generally, comes from the absence of feedback of interaction force cues in a medical device (e.g., a needle and a thread). Even if there is haptic feedback to the operator, the operator may have a difficulty to detect a specific force such as suture breakage force. To deal with this problem, we propose a control method which can detect a suture breakage force more sensitively by considering human perception characteristics. A performance objective of the control method is designed according to the human perceptual factor, just noticeable difference. By convex optimization of the performance indices, a stabilizing H
_∞
controller is proposed for the telesurgical system. Finally, the proposed control scheme is validated via a simulation study.