A Handheld Master Controller for RobotAssisted Microsurgery Accurate masterslave control is important for RobotAssisted Microsurgery (RAMS). This paper presents a handheld master controller for the operation and training of RAMS. A 9axis Inertial Measure Unit (IMU) and a micro camera are utilized to form the sensing system for the handheld controller. A new hybrid marker pattern is designed to achieve reliable visual tracking, which integrated QR codes, Aruco markers, and chessboard vertices. Realtime multisensor fusion is implemented to further improve the tracking accuracy. The proposed handheld controller has been verified on an inhouse microsurgical robot to assess its usability and robustness. User studies were conducted based on a trajectory following task, which indicated that the proposed handheld controller had comparable performance with the Phantom Omni, demonstrating its potential applications in microsurgical robot control and training.

Design and Verification of A Portable Master Manipulator Based on an Effective Workspace Analysis Framework Master manipulators represent a key component of RobotAssisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RAMIS). In this paper, an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method is used to construct an effective workspace analysis framework, which can assist the configuration selection and design evaluation of a portable master manipulator for surgical robot control and training. The proposed framework is designed based on three criteria: 1) compactness, 2) workspace quality, and 3) mapping efficiency. A hardware prototype, called the Hamlyn Compact Robotic Master (Hamlyn CRM), is constructed following the proposed framework. Experimental verification of the platform is conducted on the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) with which a da Vinci robot is controlled as a slave. The proposed Hamlyn CRM is compared with Phantom Omni, a commercial portable master device, with results demonstrating the relative merits of the new platform in terms of task completion time, average control speed and number of clutching.