Lapabot: A compact telesurgical robot system for minimally invasive surgery: Part II. Telesurgery evaluation

AbstractAs described in Part I, the Lapabot was developed considering telesurgery from the initial design stage. The robot configuration is based on the master-slave structure in which the operator can be separated spatially from the patient. The distributed control architecture communicating through high-speed network enables remote control of surgical robot manipulators. In this work, we added network communication modules using user datagram protocol/internet protocol for implementation of the telesurgical system. For a stable network environment, a dedicated research network was adopted. To characterize the network environment, a data packet sender and a repeater whose packet length and packet structure are similar to those of the real data packet were developed. The developed system was evaluated through in-vitro and in-vivo experiments. With the developed system, we have successfully performed remote control of the Lapabot. The roundtrip time delay for the control signal ranged from 1.4 to 4.1 ms. T...