Development of Control Framework for Spine Surgery Robot Using EtherCAT

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time control framework for a spine surgery robot using EtherCAT, focusing on ensuring safety, determinism, and precise timing in complex medical robotic systems.

Contribution

Development of an EtherCAT-based control framework with a real-time Linux master for improved safety and timing accuracy in spine surgery robots.

Findings

Achieved stable periodicity and low jitter in control signals

Demonstrated real-time performance in prototype system

Validated system safety and timing precision

Abstract

As the more sensors and actuators are used in the robotic systems to provide more features, complexity of the system is increasing. When it comes to medical robotics, it becomes harder to ensure safety and determinism in the system. To deal with increasing complexity and ensure precise periodicity and execution timing for a medical robot, in this paper we report development of EtherCAT master as a part of software framework for spine surgery robot. We implemented multi-axis controller using open-source EtherCAT master running in real-time preemptive Linux. We evaluated the real-time performance of the system in terms of periodicity, jitter and execution time in our first prototype of spine surgery robot.