A Kinesthetic Teaching System for a Robotic Arm for Middle Ear Surgery

Surgery in the middle ear poses a challenging task to the surgeon. The delicate nature of the anatomic structures combined with their limited accessibility calls for robotic assistance. Rather than using handheld instruments such an approach aims to enable the surgeon to operate with the help of manipulators which can be positioned precisely and easily, thereby increasing the accuracy and reducing the workload of the operation. An extension to a robotic micro-manipulator system allowing strong improvements in usability and precision is presented in this paper. In order to increase the flexibility and ease of the workflow, a robotic arm was added as a carrier system for the micro-manipulator. This article describes a new method to implement a system for kinesthetic guidance and teaching for such an arm in the context of middle ear surgery. The goal is to enable the surgeon to interact with the robot intuitively by holding it close to the end effector and simply moving it as desired. By recording the poses set by the user, the robot can retrace them when required. This new approach includes implementing the mechanism for kinesthetic guidance through circuit solutions rather than software. A relay circuit allowing free motion of the robot during guidance and teaching as well as direct access to the CAN bus of the robot arm to ensure direct control and readout are key to achieving the presented benefits. It is shown that this setup increases usability for coarse positioning and decreases the workload and time required. In addition, safety features have been developed to ensure that no unintentional movement of the robot arm will occur.