Unilateral Teleoperation Design for a Robotic Endoscopic Pituitary Surgery System

The aim of this study is to develop a teleoperation system which will be used to support the endoscopic pituitary surgery procedures. The proposed system aims to enable the surgeon to operate with three different operation tools (one of them is the endoscope) simultaneously. By this way, it is expected that the productivity of the surgical operation will be improved and the duration of the operation will be shortened. In the proposed system, a main control unit that can be attached to any of the surgical tools that are used in the operation (other than the endoscope) will be developed to capture the motion of the surgeon’s hand motion as demanded by the surgeon, to process the captured motion and to send it to the robot that handles the endoscope. In this way, the endoscope will be directed simultaneously by the surgeon throughout the operation while he/she is using the other surgical tools with his/her two hands. In this paper, the study to determine the type and processing of information that is sent from the surgeon’s side to the endoscope robot is presented.