Mohamed Bouri - Supernumerary Robotic Manipulation for Laparoscopic Surgery. SRD@AIM-20
Channel: Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship Lab
Date: 29/07/2020

Supernumerary Robotic Manipulation for Laparoscopic surgery: Envisioned Scenarios and Results

Presented by Prof. Mohamed Bouri, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Invited Lecture at the 1st Workshop on Supernumerary Robotic Devices held as part of the 2020 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM 2020).

Workshop website: https://aim2020srd.wixsite.com/aim2020srd

Abstract: 
Manipulation tasks are often bimanual, regardless that in several cases humans require to be assisted to successfully achieve their tasks, could be for assembly or positioning ; could be for precise applications or when manipulating heavy objects. To this end, more attention and coordination is required between the two persons, or more, involved in the same manipulation task. In our project we envision to give the control to only one operator, who will finally carry out the manipulation using his two biological hands, while being in control of two robotic arms- This supernumerary 4-handed manipulation has the main objective to increase the success of the operation by decreasing communication errors between the operator and his assistant, by increasing the manipulation area and by easing the execution of the tasks in giving the full control to only one operator. In [Abdi et al, 2016], we already proved that even in demanding tasks, three-handed manipulation is preferred to two-handed manipulation. This presentation will address the application of laparoscopic surgery [Abdi et al., 2015] [Hernandez et al., 2019]. This work is carried out in collaboration between the research group REHAssist and the lab LASA, both at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. It is a follow up of our investigation to the capabilities of surgeons to foot-control a laparoscopic instrument [Abdi et al., 2017]. A bipedal foot interface has been developed to achieved the control of two robotic arms, 5 degrees of freedom each. This foot-haptic interface [Hernandez et al., 2019] is capable to provide 5 DOFs foot force feedback to improve foot control perception. On the other side, the robots are implemented with assistance control strategies [Amanhoud et al., 2020]. The presented results will point out that force assistance improves human-robot interaction in four-handed manipulation, as well as reduces fatigue, improves ease of use and usefulness.