Force Control of Surgical Robot with Time Delay using Model Predictive Control

Tele-surgical robotic systems are making our vision of “virtual open surgery” into reality by using minimum invasive techniques with laparoscopic vision technology. The commercial available minimally invasive robotic systems (MIRS) force the surgeons to forgo the ability to touch and feel the environment, unlike conventional open surgery. Surgeons rely on the visual feedback from the patient’s side at the master console to get information about the operation site. The control gets even more difficult in the teleoperated surgical systems due to random network delays. The difference in the network delay in data and perception makes hand to eye coordination even more difficult. Force feedback can offer surgeon instant perception of the physical properties at the operating end. A novel approach is proposed to control the force of a surgical robot suffering from signal delays using model predictive control. The proposed MPC-scheme of force control in between the master and slave station shows compensation of the deterministic time delays.