Sensory subtraction via cutaneous feedback: a novel technique to improve the transparency of robotic surgery

In this paper we present a novel technique to force feedback in robot-assisted surgery. It consists of substituting haptic force, composed by kinesthetic and cutaneous components, with cutaneous stimuli only. The force generated can be thus thought as a subtraction between the complete haptic interaction, cutaneous and kinesthetic, and the kinesthetic part of it. For this reason, we refer to this approach as sensory subtraction and not sensory substitution. Sensory subtraction, first introduced in [1], aims at improving the performance of conventional force feedback techniques in teleoperation while guaranteeing the same stability properties. In this work we recall the idea of sensory subtraction in teleoperation, together with its evaluation in two paradigmatic surgical teleoperation scenarios.