Design of a High Fidelity Haptic Device for Telesurgery

Good performances in tele-surgery procedures is achieved when the surgeon acts and feels as if he were holding directly in his hands the surgical instruments interacting with the patient. To reach this goal, a high fidelity haptic device was recently developed at CEA LIST. As the development of such an input device calls for a precise understanding of the application requirements, we first introduce in this paper Minimally Invasive Surgery problematics and associated design guidelines. Then we focus on dimensioning and optimisation of input device performances allowing high quality remote handling. Finally, we present master arm first and second generation prototypes and their performances.