A PC-based Workstation for Robotic Discectomy

This paper describes a PC-based controller for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery. The development is motivated by the need of reducing the exposure of operating room personnel to X-rays during surgical procedures such as percu-taneous discectomy. The approach taken consists of upgrading the hardware architecture and the control software of a clean-room PUMA 260 manipulator, and by developing a new vision-based operator interface. The original PUMA controller is interfaced to a PC for trajectory generation and force/torque data acquisition. Kinematic and communication functions are ported to the PC from the RCCL package. The operator interface is used for robot calibration and motion commands. In this implementation, position control and force/torque data acquisition are executed every 28 ms, thus preserving the original robot performance. Preliminary tests have shown the validity of this approach and readiness of the system for more realistic experiments in the operating room.