One issue of robotic microsurgery is that compared to manual surgery, the operation time tends to be longer due to high motion scaling. To address this issue, we developed a new controller that can provide the accuracy required for microsurgery without a high scaling factor by utilizing fingertip and wrist motions. Also, for the better outcome of surgery, the proposed controller has a force feedback function which is not available for the existing controllers for microsurgical robots. A challenge of designing such a controller is associated with the size requirement. For conventional microsurgery, surgeons perform surgical procedures while looking at the eyepieces of a surgical microscope and the same applies for robotic microsurgery. The only space available to manipulate controllers is a narrow space between the patient/surgical bed and the surgeon. To satisfy this constraint, the proposed controller is integrated with a handrest and the controller’s DOFs are strategically allocated. In this work, as the first step of addressing the issue of prolonged operational time, we built a prototype controller and evaluated the accuracy and task space with simulations. The results indicated that by using the fingertip and wrist motions with a scaling factor of 3x, 0.5 mm diameter circles could be traced with a mean bidirectional precision of 0.0485 mm. Also, 10.0 mm diameter circles were traceable with the same scaling factor.

Timing synchronization is essential in case where multiple sensor nodes with ultrasonic sensors are deployed on the same place. This is because the ultrasonic sensors should be powered at an appropriate timing so as to prevent ultrasonic interference. In this paper, we propose a new timing synchronization method for ZigBee sensor network for ecology observation. In this method, a sensor node has been configured as a ZigBee router in order to exchange time information among nodes in real-time. Moreover, by concentrating the processing load to the server, the amount of calculation at each node can be minimized and is unaffected by the increase in nodes. By using the proposal method, it is concluded that the time synchronization should be executed per every few minutes in order to detect moving objects by the ultrasonic sensors.