Robot-assisted surgical systems can be used to extend the capabilities of surgeons. A number of surgical robots have been successfully utilized in several surgical applications. This paper presents our recent work on the design of a robot-assisted, laryngeal surgical system. The system works in a master-slave operation mode. PHANToM Desktop devices are used as the master of the system. The slave of this system, which has dual arms, is designed and optimized to perform laryngeal surgeries with high precision and dexterity. The results of animal experiments show that it is possible to apply the system to perform minimally invasive throat surgery through a laryngoscope

This paper presents a haptic device with gripping force feedback, which is a part of the microsurgery robot system developed in our lab. This device includes a master manipulator with an interactive gripping force sensing, and a relative sensing finger located at the end of the slave manipulator. Their effectiveness is tested and verified by experiments. It can be concluded from an animal experiment that this haptic device can realize the interactive gripping force sensing under the master-slave manipulation.

A robotic system with force feedback for micro-surgery is developed (named “Microhand”). The system designed is based on a master-slave operation mode. The slave manipulators are designed by using macro-micro frames. The PHANToM Desktop developed by the SensaAble Technology Company is used as the master device. The interactive force/torque information of the slave manipulators and the surgical environments measured by the six-dimension force/torque sensors are fed back to the master device, so that the system is capable of providing force feedback to the surgeon during operations. The validity of the system has been proved through animal experiments of vas suturing a rabbit’s 3mm in diameter neck artery and its 1mm in diameter leg artery.