In the medical field, several surgical simulators and training platforms have been developed to help novice surgeons improve their surgical skills, as well as perform preoperative planning. In this paper, a haptic platform for surgical needle insertion training gestures is presented. Instead of relying on active actuators, an alternative solution, consisting in passive brakes based on Electro-Rheological (ER) fluids, is proposed, to provide a safe and realistic physical feedback to the physician. This platform generates a passive repulsive force against the user's movement, providing him/her a physical stimulus and, thus, a realistic haptic feedback. The goal of this project is to prove the reliability of ERF-based brakes to simulate the physical resistance of soft tissues against the movement of a surgical needle, in order to train unskilled practitioners in different scenarios. To achieve this objective, a prototype has been built, its kinematic model has been obtained and experimentally validated. The modelling, the bandwidth analysis and the force control scheme of the platform are also presented.

An analysis of stability and transparency of a force feedback teleoperation system for cutting-edge robotic surgery is presented. Previous works in teleoperated robotic surgery do not consider the real behavior of the environment, which was supposed to be only elastic. However, new surgical procedures in which the environment dynamics plays a crucial role start emerging as a result of technological progress. In robotic assisted beating-heart surgery, for instance, the dynamics of the contact between surgical tools and soft tissues has an impact not only in the performance of the force control task but also in the performance of the teleoperation control scheme in terms of transparency and stability. Therefore, a more realistic description of the environment has to be adopted in order to safely operate during robot-patient interaction. For this purpose, a viscoelastic contact model is introduced into the bilateral teleoperation scheme, and a performance study is provided. The obtained results show the advantages of the selected approach when targeting teleoperated surgical interventions in which the interaction dynamics has become a significant issue.