Revista de Engenharia da Computação e Tecnologia da Informação

An Advanced Robot System for Diagnostic and Therapeutics Tasks with Application in Laparoscopic Surgery

Veronika Ivanova, Dichko Bachvarov and Ani Boneva

The main target of everyone engineering work associated with minimally-invasive surgery is to provide adequate tool-tissue force information to the surgeons so that they can regain the sense of touch that has been lost through laparoscopic surgery. In this context, the main objective of the work design novel family laparoscopic tools with better technical characteristics, and incorporation of force and other sensors and elements in construction of tools for restore sense of touch in the process of laparoscopy. Thus it is improving some technical side of this laparoscopic instrument. In contrast to daVinchi robots by Intuitive Surgical Incorporation which instruments are designed for manipulation and imaging we offer family tools with additional functions such as diagnosis and therapeutics tasks. Therefore we decide two main problems (i) we were designed and produced an original construction of an adequate experimental module for robots, where was incorporated two force sensors to provide tool-tissue information (some of which was described and discussed at previous works) and (ii) we ware realized hardware and program resources for control and monitoring of this module which is the object of this work. The computer program includes information about various measurements of the tip tool - surface contact interactions and data obtained from the experimental module that is used to find the difference between date from previous measuring and received information in real time. Another signification advantage of the proposed program solution is the graphical visualization of the measuring and comparing the results. Therefore the surgeon can give the adequate command to force interaction between the instrument and tissue. For verification of the functionality and working capacity of the experimental module with force feedback capabilities for robots were conducted different experiments with the designed control system.