Investigation of Navigation and Robotic System for Computer Assisted Orthopedic Surgery: State-of-Art and Preliminary Results

In order to help surgeons improve tool insertion accuracy in pelvic-acetabular surgery, it is very important to take advantage of the emerging navigation, guidance and robotics technologies. The computer integrated surgical system is promising for pelvic-acetabular surgery. In most of the procedures of pelvic-acetabular surgery, such as drilling or milling operations, there are many delicate operations involving inserting the tools accurately and precisely in a confined workspace. This article mainly investigates the most important two subsystems: navigation and robotic system, which perform sensing and actuating tasks, respectively. For navigation subsystem, a remark is made between the state-of-art optical tracking systems (OTS). A hybrid tracking method is proposed to integrate optical tracking and inertial sensing techniques, and some preliminary results are given through the proofof-concepts experiments. For robotics subsystem, we survey the existing studies on the orthopedic compliant robot arms, together with our proposals for the pelvic surgery. We investigate some of the industrial robotics arms with good repeatability and dexterity while positioning the surgical tools.