Design and implementation of a wireless instrument adapter
This work addresses the need for realistic testing setups in surgical robotics research, though it is incremental as it focuses on calibration and implementation of an existing adapter concept.
The paper tackled the problem of evaluating motion control methods in minimally invasive robotic surgery by designing a wireless instrument adapter for da Vinci instruments, achieving repeatability with an RMSE of 0.27° for pitching and 4.7° for yawing in same-direction poses.
The evaluation of new methods for control and manipulation in minimally invasive robotic surgery requires a realistic setup. To decouple the evaluation of methods from overall clinical systems, we propose an instrument adapter for the S line EndoWrist\c{opyright} instruments of the da Vinci surgical system. The adapter is small and lightweight and can be mounted to any robot to mimic motion. We describe its design and implementation, as well as a setup to calibrate instruments to study precise motion control. Our results indicate that each instrument requires individual calibration. The calibration shows that the system is not fully linear. The repeatability of poses in the same sense of rotation has an RMSE of 0.27°/ and a standard deviation below 0.3° for pitching and 4.7° for yawing averaged over three measurements. When comparing the same poses in clockwise and counter-clockwise direction the RMSE is 12.8° and 5.7° for pitching and yawing, respectively. This is likely due to motor hysteresis.