Walid Shaker

Walid Shaker, Mustafa Suphi Erden

Robotic surgery represents a major breakthrough in medical interventions, which has revolutionized surgical procedures. However, the high cost and limited accessibility of robotic surgery systems pose significant challenges for training purposes. This study addresses these issues by developing a cost-effective robotic laparoscopy training system that closely replicates advanced robotic surgery setups to ensure broad access for both on-site and remote users. Key innovations include the design of a low-cost robotic end-effector that effectively mimics high-end laparoscopic instruments. Additionally, a digital twin platform was established, facilitating detailed simulation, testing, and real-time monitoring, which enhances both system development and deployment. Furthermore, teleoperation control was optimized, leading to improved trajectory tracking while maintaining remote center of motion (RCM) constraint, with a RMSE of 5 μm and reduced system latency to 0.01 seconds. As a result, the system provides smooth, continuous motion and incorporates essential safety features, making it a highly effective tool for laparoscopic training.

Walid Shaker, Mustafa Suphi Erden

Robotic-assisted surgery offers significant clinical advantages but largely eliminates direct haptic feedback, increasing the risk of excessive tool-tissue interaction forces. Although recent commercial systems have begun to introduce force feedback, their high cost limits accessibility, particularly for surgical training. This paper presents a modular experimental robotic laparoscopic instrument integrated with a real-time haptic feedback framework. The proposed instrument employs a wrist-mounted force/torque (F/T) sensor to estimate tool-tissue interaction forces while avoiding the durability and integration challenges of tip-mounted sensors. A haptic feedback framework is developed to extract the external contact forces, render them to the haptic device, and generate stable and perceptually meaningful feedback. The instrument is integrated into the robotic surgery training system (RoboScope) and evaluated through a controlled user study involving a force regulation task. Experimental results demonstrate that haptic feedback significantly improves task success rate, force regulation accuracy, and task efficiency compared to visual-only feedback. The proposed instrument enables stable, high-fidelity haptic interaction, supporting effective robotic surgery training.

Walid Shaker, Mustafa Suphi Erden

Haptic feedback has been a long-missed feature in robotic-assisted surgery, one that would allow surgeons to perceive tissue properties and apply controlled forces during delicate procedures. Although commercial robotic systems have begun to integrate haptic technologies, their high costs limit accessibility for training and research purposes. To address this gap, we extend our previously developed low-cost robotic surgery training setup, RoboScope, by incorporating a wrist-mounted force/torque (F/T) sensor for haptic feedback training. Wrist-mounted sensing avoids many challenges associated with tip-mounted sensors but introduces additional non-contact forces, such as gravity, sensor bias, installation offsets, and associated torques, which compromise measurement accuracy. In this paper, we propose a robust real-time compensation method based on recursive least squares (RLS). This method eliminates the need for dataset collection and frequent recalibration while adapting to changing operating conditions. Experimental validation demonstrates that the proposed approach achieves over 95% error reduction in non-contact force compensation and more than 91% in non-contact torque compensation, significantly outperforming existing methods. These results highlight the potential of our approach for providing reliable haptic feedback in robotic surgery training and research.