• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.19 no.12
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• pp.1160-1166
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• 2013

This paper presents feedforward controllers to improve the control performance of the motion and grasping force of a surgical instrument used in an MIS (Minimally Invasive Surgery) robot. The surgical instrument has a long distance between the drive motors and its active joints. Therefore, the gripper on the instrument is controlled by a cable drive mechanism, which generates a coupled motion between the wrist joint and the grip direction. In order to solve the problem, this paper analyzes the pulley composition of the surgical instrument and proposes feedforward controllers to eliminate the coupled motion. Furthermore, feedforward controllers to regulate the grasping force are proposed to deal with another coupling problem between the grasping force of the instrument and the motion of the instrument joints. The experimental results demonstrate the improved control performance of the motion and grasping force of the instrument.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.20-28
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• 2012

In spite of the difficulties and uncertain characteristic of cable driven method, surgical robot instrument has adopted it as driving mechanism for various reasons. To overcome the problem of cable system, previous research applied SMCSPO (sliding mode control with sliding perturbation observer) algorithm as robust controller to control the instrument and found that the value of SPO (sliding perturbation observer) followed force disturbance, reaction force loaded on the tip very similarly. Thus, this paper confirms that the perturbation observer is sufficient estimator which finds out the mount of loaded force on the surgical robot instrument. To prove the proposition, simulation using the similar model with an actual instrument and experimental evaluation are performed. The results show that it is possible to substitute SPO for sensors to measure the reaction force. This estimated reaction force will be used to realize haptic function by sending the reaction force to a master device for a surgeon. The results will contribute to create surgical benefit such as shortening the practice time of a surgeon and giving haptic information to surgeon by using it as haptic signal to protect an organ by making force boundary.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.22 no.8
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• pp.579-584
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• 2016

When surgical instruments are tracked in an image-guided surgical navigation system, a stereo vision system with high accuracy is generally used, which is called optical tracker. However, this optical tracker has the disadvantage that a line-of-sight between the tracker and surgical instrument must be maintained. Therefore, to complement the disadvantage of optical tracking systems, an internal vision sensor is attached to a surgical instrument in this paper. Monitoring the target marker pattern attached on patient with this vision sensor, this surgical instrument is possible to be tracked even when the line-of-sight of the optical tracker is occluded. To verify the system's effectiveness, a series of basic experiments is carried out. Lastly, an integration experiment is conducted. The experimental results show that rotational error is bounded to max $1.32^{\circ}$ and mean $0.35^{\circ}$, and translation error is in max 1.72mm and mean 0.58mm. Finally, it is confirmed that the proposed tool tracking method using an internal vision sensor is useful and effective to overcome the occlusion problem of the optical tracker.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.16 no.9
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• pp.840-845
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• 2010

This paper proposes the method indirectly measuring the operating force of the end-effect tip of surgical robot instrument which conducts the surgical operation in the body on behalf of the surgeon's hand. Due to the size and safety obligation to the surgical robot instrument, it is difficult to measure the operation force of its tip like grasping force. However the instrument is driven by cable-pulley torque transmission mechanism and when some force is occurred at the tip, then the reaction force appears on the cable as additional tension. Based on this phenomenon, this paper proposes a method to estimate the operating force from measuring reaction force against the driving motor by using a loadcell. And it induces mathematical equation to calculate the force from loadcell by approaching the modulus of elasticity to high order polynomial. And this paper proves the validity of proposed mechanism by experimental test.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.6 no.10
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• pp.2679-2691
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• 2012

In this paper, a high accuracy stereo reconstruction method for surgery instruments positioning is proposed. Usually, the problem of surgical instruments reconstruction is considered as a basic task in computer vision to estimate the 3-D position of each marker on a surgery instrument from three pairs of image points. However, the existing methods considered the 3-D reconstruction of the points separately thus ignore the structure information. Meanwhile, the errors from light variation, imaging noise and quantization still affect the reconstruction accuracy. This paper proposes a method which takes the structure information of surgical instruments as constraints, and reconstructs the whole markers on one surgical instrument together. Firstly, we calibrate the instruments before navigation to get the structure parameters. The structure parameters consist of markers' number, distances between each markers and a linearity sign of each instrument. Then, the structure constraints are added to stereo reconstruction. Finally, weighted filter is used to reduce the jitter. Experiments conducted on surgery navigation system showed that our method not only improve accuracy effectively but also reduce the jitter of surgical instrument greatly.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.203-210
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• 2019

This paper proposes a hand-controller mechanism for manually controlled endoscopic surgical instruments. A wire-driven mechanism is typically adapted for endoscopic surgical tools because motors cannot be embedded to the joints due to the size limitation. The wire-driven mechanism requires length control of wires that are pulled and released according to the desired joint angle. It is difficult for the operator to control individual wire lengths intuitively. The hand-controller mechanism should be able to control the wires easily without complex processes. For this purpose, we propose a mechanism that can control the wire lengths with a simple mechanical structure and its optimal design method using genetic algorithm. We show the simulation and experimental results to confirm the proposed mechanism and design methods are useful for the manually controlled endoscopic surgical instrument.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.965-966
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• 2009

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2010.11a
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• pp.779-780
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• 2010

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.804-808
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• 2004

This paper deals with the designing of instrument for achieving surgical operation in the stomach and gullet using endoscope channel. The method used herein was to provide beads to knot suturing thread automatically. Following design rules were applied : 1) that instrument must be designed to enable surgical operator to stitch successively by only simple handling 2) that instrument must be designed to minimize insertion and extraction of endoscope. The main result from the experiment with animal stomach was that the surgical operation time was reduced and successive suture was available. Considering the requirement of operator‘s highly trained skills and the discomfort of patient in traditional suture process, the proposed design is expected to markedly improve the endoscopic suturing performance.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.164-171
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• 2021

This paper proposes a continuum mechanism for manually controlled endoscopic surgical instruments. The wire-driven mechanism is typically adapted for endoscopic surgical tools because motors cannot be embedded to the joints due to the size limitation. However, the conventional wire-driven mechanism has inherent problems caused by redundancy, such as deflection and low precision. It does not have operating force and manipulability for surgery. Therefore, a method to increase the force of the continuum mechanism using a multi-wire with simple mechanical structure is proposed. Moreover, for intuitive operation, a hand-controller mechanism that can manipulate the length of the wire without complex process is proposed. Finally, we show that the proposed mechanism and methods are applicable to endoscopic surgical tools through simple experiments.