A haptic force feedback system for teleoperated needle insertion

A teleoperated needle insertion system is an effective way to prevent the physician from repeated X-ray exposures. The process of needle placement is under continuous control of the physician while the patient is kept in remote scanner. Real-time haptic feedback allows the needle insertion to be performed in a safer way and improves performance of surgeons. This paper presents a teleoperated control system with haptic feedback for needle insertion. In our system, a 2 degrees of freedom (DOF) haptic prototype machine is designed for display of the needle insertion force of the tissues to operators during needle insertion. A high-precision displacement platform is used in slave robot to track the displacement of the master robot. Then, we proposed a novel force control framework include two control loops to match the force signals from slave robot to feedback force precisely. The inner loop is a current controller, the outer loop is a force-tracking controller. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experimental results.