Surgical robots are often controlled by the surgeon through a teleoperation interface. However, to date there are still only limited guidelines on how to design such an interface for it to be intuitive for the user. Thus, this project is devoted to investigate how an intuitive user interface can be created that allows the surgeons to easily plan, simulate and perform the surgical tasks at hand.

The project’s focus lies on two different aspects of the user interface: the telemanipulator handle and the haptic feedback for both simulation of and guidance during the intervention. As to date it is not known how the handle of a telemanipulator influences teleoperation performance, different handles are developed, evaluated and compared. This will allow us to choose the most intuitive handle for our application. In addition, we are working on simulating medical data sets (e.g. CT data) haptically to add a new modality to current virtual reality planning and simulation systems.

The projects direction of novel possibilities for simulation have been on hold since August 2020. Efforts to acquire funding covering further work are ongoing. As soon as more funding could be acquired, this promising project will be resumed.

For more information, feel free to contact the project leader Dr. Nicolas Gerig.