Service d'Automatique et d'Analyse des Systèmes - Research

Our work aims at studying and developing control laws for providing force feedback in robotic surgery. In this framework, the surgeon manipulates a master robot and a slave robot reproduces the movement of the master within the patient’s body. Presently, the only information on the operating environment is provided through cameras inserted in the patient’s body. Yet certain operations, like palpation of cancerous nodules or needle insertion in specific tissues, only rely on the sense of touch (or the haptic perception) of the surgeon. Therefore, in order to be able to perform such operations by minimally invasive surgery or endoscopy, it is necessary to develop specific master-slave devices equipped with appropriate control laws. The challenges of these control applications are the large variability in the properties of the environment made of soft tissues as well as in the way the surgeons holds the operating devices. Besides, frictions forces are of the same order of magnitude as the forces to be fed back to the operator, which requires appropriate friction compensation schemes.

Link:

• website