복강경 수술로봇을 위한 실시간 운영체제 기반 제어 시스템의 개발

Abstract

This paper reports on a realtime OS based master-slave configuration robot control system for laparoscopic surgery robot which enables telesurgery and overcomes shortcomings with conventional laparoscopic surgery. Surgery robot system requires control system that can process large volume information such as medical image data and video signal from endoscope in real-time manner, as well as precisely control the robot with high reliability. To meet the complex requirements, the use of high-level real-time OS (Operating System) in surgery robot controller is a must, which is as common as in many of modern robot controllers that adopt real-time OS as a base system software on which specific functional modules are implemened for more reliable and stable system. The control system consists of joint controllers, host controllers, and user interface units. The robot features a compact slave robot with 5 DOF (Degree-Of-Freedom) expanding the workspace of each tool and increasing the number of tools operating simultaneously. Each master, slave and GUI (Graphical User Interface) host runs a dedicated RTOS (Real-time OS), RTLinux-Pro (FSMLabs Inc., U.S.A.) on which functional modules such as motion control, communication, video signal integration and etc, are implemented, and all the hosts are in a gigabit Ethernet network for inter-host communication. Each master and slave controller set has a dedicated CAN (Controller Area Network) channel for control and monitoring signal communication with the joint controllers. Total 4 pairs of the master/slave manipulators as current are controlled by one host controller. The system showed satisfactory performance in both position control precision and master-slave motion synchronization in both bench test and animal experiment, and is now under further development for better safety and control fidelity for clinically applicable prototype.