RobotAssisted Microsurgery Development at JPL

Microsurgeons use a microscope with 20 to 30 times magnification to help them visualize the microscopic field they work with. However, they still use their hands to hold instruments that manipulate tissue with feature sizes from fifty to a few hundred microns. A microsurgical manipulator that can scale down the surgeon's hand motions to the microscopic field would allow the average surgeon to perform at the level of the best surgeons and allow the most skillful surgeons to perform at unprecedented levels of dexterity. Development of practical systems for assisting microsurgeons in this way is a growing field of research. Microtelerobotic workstations systems that have been developed for biomedical applications.

The work reported here is the result of collaboration between researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Steve Charles, a vitreo-retinal surgeon. The Robot-Assisted Microsurgery (RAMS) telerobotic workstation developed at JPL is a prototype of a system that will be completely under the manual control of a surgeon. It is unique in its combination of compact size, light weight, and high precision. The system, has a slave robot that holds surgical instruments. The surgeon commands motions for the instrument by moving the handle on a master device in the desired trajectories. The trajectories are measured, filtered, and scaled down then used to drive the slave robot.

We present the details of this telerobotic system by first giving an overview of the subsystems and their interactions and then presenting details. The chapter concludes with a description of a recent demonstration of a simulated microsurgery procedure performed at JPL.