Stabilization System Based on Vision-Assisted Force Feedback

In recent years, an increasing number of auto or semi-auto surgical devices and robots are used to assist surgeons in carrying out surgeries. Many of them are designed to provide surgical treatments to patients automatically or semi-automatically in the doctor’s/surgeon’s office rather than the operating room. The office-based surgical device can potentially make the conventional surgical procedures more efficient and more affordable. However, due to the office-based design, it is no longer possible to subject the patient to general anesthesia (GA), i.e., the patient can be awake during the surgical treatment with the device. To ensure the safety and maintain a high success rate, it is very important that the relative motion and the contact force between the surgical device and the contacting object can be stabilized. To this end, a control scheme using force and vision feedback is proposed in this chapter.