Medical robotics can help improve and extend the reach of healthcare services. A major challenge for medical robots is the complex physical interaction between the robot and the patients which is required to be safe. This work presents the preliminary evaluation of a recently introduced control architecture based on the Fractal Impedance Control (FIC) in medical applications. The deployed FIC architecture is robust to delay between the master and the replica robots. It can switch online between an admittance and impedance behaviour, and it is robust to interaction with unstructured environments. Our experiments analyse three scenarios: teleoperated surgery, rehabilitation, and remote ultrasound scan. The experiments did not require any adjustment of the robot tuning, which is essential in medical applications where the operators do not have an engineering background required to tune the controller. Our results show that is possible to teleoperate the robot to cut using a scalpel, do an ultrasound scan, and perform remote occupational therapy. However, our experiments also highlighted the need for a better robots embodiment to precisely control the system in 3D dynamic tasks.

翻译：医疗机器人有助于提升和扩展医疗服务的覆盖范围。医疗机器人的一个主要挑战在于机器人与患者之间复杂的物理交互，这种交互必须确保安全。本研究对一种基于分形阻抗控制（Fractal Impedance Control, FIC）的新型控制架构在医疗应用中的初步评估进行了介绍。所部署的FIC架构对主从机器人间的时延具有鲁棒性，能够在线切换导纳与阻抗行为，并且在与非结构化环境交互时表现稳健。我们的实验分析了三种场景：遥操作手术、康复训练和远程超声扫描。实验过程中无需调整机器人参数，这对于操作者不具备控制器调参所需工程背景的医疗应用场景至关重要。实验结果表明，该系统能够通过遥操作控制机器人使用手术刀进行切割、实施超声扫描以及执行远程职业治疗。然而，实验也凸显了需要更优的机器人具身设计以实现三维动态任务中系统的精确控制。