UC San Diego

Continuum robots are commonly used as surgical robots, due to their flexibility inconfined workspaces. Since continuum robots have a very large number of degrees of freedom,it is a challenging task for humans to control them, and a proper user interface is requiredto serve as a input device. Haptic interfaces offer significant potential to be used as inputdevices for teleoperation, due to their force feedback that can help users better control therobots. However, few haptic interface systems have been developed for the control of continuumrobots. We proposed a novel 3D haptic trackball as an input device to control tendon-drivencontinuum robots. The system will let the user control the tip position of a tendon-driven robotwith high accuracy, as well as provide haptic force feedback when necessary, so as to assistthe user with controlling the robot in different tasks. We design a user study to evaluate theperformance of our proposed system and compare it with an off-the-shelf interface, a joystick ona gamepad, which has been previously used as an experimental interface for continuum robots.We asked the users to perform a path following task and a obstacle avoiding task in a 600mm×300mm×300mm workspace. Results show that our proposed haptic trackball interfaceenables higher accuracy in path following and lower chances of hitting obstacles in obstacleavoiding, compared to using the joystick interface. Although the runtime of our system in eachtask is longer than that of the joystick, considering the scenario of surgical processes, whereaccuracy and safety are often much more important than speed, the sacrifice in speed has areduced influence on system performance. Overall, our proposed interface performs better thanconventional interfaces in terms of positional precision and obstacles avoidance, thus havinggreat potentials to be used in robotic assisted surgery.