The application consists of two parts that communicate with each other via a secure network. There is a vision processing unit installed on the slave robot side, which reports information to a haptic force computation unit installed on the master side.

The goal of the application is to provide haptic force feedback to the surgical robot when the remote surgical instrument encounters the proximity of the protected region during surgery.

The slave robot side software is installed on a CPU unit, which is responsible for collecting multiple RGB-D sensor data, and a GPU unit that generates point cloud description of the scanned surgical field in real time. The master robot side software is installed on a simulated surgeon’s console (a PC for example) that controls the robot hardware; the software is running the haptic force rendering algorithm to compute haptic force that is sent to the haptic device at 1000Hz.

Team Information: University of Illinois, Thenkurussi (Kesh) Kesavadas, [email protected], (217)-2449341, Xiao Li, [email protected], (412)-7063374