A Generalized Approach to Impedance Control Design for Robotic Minimally Invasive Surgery

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generalized energy-based control framework for robotic minimally invasive surgery, designing virtual mechanisms to improve instrument positioning through incisions with optimized stability and performance.

Contribution

It proposes a novel generalized approach to impedance control using virtual mechanisms, tailored for surgical robots, with a new parameter tuning method ensuring stability and performance.

Findings

Two new virtual mechanisms for surgical instrument control

Application of Larby and Forni's tuning method for stability

Enhanced control performance in minimally invasive surgery

Abstract

Energy based control methods are at the core of modern robotic control algorithms. In this paper we present a general approach to virtual model/mechanism control, which is a powerful design tool to create energy based controllers. We present two novel virtual-mechanisms designed for robotic minimally invasive surgery, which control the position of a surgical instrument while passing through an incision. To these virtual mechanisms we apply the parameter tuning method of Larby and Forni 2022, which optimizes for local performance while ensuring global stability.