A New Surgical Drill Instrument With Force Sensing and Force Feedback for Robotically Assisted Otologic Surgery

Abstract

Drilling through bone is a common task during otologic procedures. Currently, the drilling tool is manually held by the surgeon. A robotically assisted surgical drill with force sensing for otologic surgery was developed, and the feasibility of using the da Vinci research kit to hold the drill and provide force feedback for temporal bone drilling was demonstrated in this paper. To accomplish intuitive motion and force feedback, the kinematics and coupling matrices of the slave manipulator were analyzed and a suitable mapping was implemented. Several experiments were completed including trajectory tracking, drill instrument calibration, and temporal bone drilling with force feedback. The results showed that good trajectory tracking performance and minor calibration errors were achieved. In addition, temporal bone drilling could be successfully performed and force feedback from the drill instrument could be felt at the master manipulator. In the future, it may be feasible to use master–slave surgical robotic systems for temporal bone drilling.