Achieving Dexterous Bidirectional Interaction in Uncertain Conditions for Medical Robotics

Medical robotics can help improve the reach of healthcare services. A challenge for medical robots is their complex physical interaction. This work evaluates a recently introduced control architecture based on Fractal Impedance Control (FIC) in medical applications. The deployed FIC architecture is robust to delay between the master and the replica robots and can switch online between an admittance and impedance behavior. Our experiments analyze three scenarios: teleoperated surgery, rehabilitation, and remote ultrasound scan. The experiments did not require any adjustment of the robot tuning, which is essential in medical applications where the operators do not have an engineering background. Our results show that it is possible to teleoperate the robot to perform remote occupational therapy, operate a scalpel, and use an ultrasound scan. However, our experiments also highlighted the need for a better robot embodiment to control the system precisely in 3D dynamic tasks.