Conventional robotic surgery employs pinch and power grips for manipulating a master manipulator. As such, the manipulating methods exhibit limitations that are strongly related to the advantages and disadvantages of the gripping type. The context of this paper is focused on the introduction of a combined grip to compensate for such restraints. In particular, this paper proposed the combined-grip-handle scheme on a master manipulator, which employs both the pinch and power grips. A pointing experiment applying the master-slave scheme was conducted with the master manipulator under several manipulating conditions of the combined grip and the conventional gripping types. Results of using the combined grip demonstrated that the positioning operation performed with fewer failures and required shorter time and trajectory. Compared with the conventional gripping types, the proposed combined grip showed better performance on the positioning operation and provided a possibility to perform precise work at lower scale factors.
Keywords: gripping type; handle; manipulating method; master slave system; robotic surgery.
© 2019 The Authors. The International Journal of Medical Robotics and Computer Assisted Surgery published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.