Hamlyn CRM: a compact master manipulator for surgical robot remote control

PURPOSE: Compact master manipulators have inherent advantages, since they can have practical deployment within the general surgical environments easily and bring benefits to surgical training. To assess the advantages of compact master manipulators for surgical skills training and the performance of general robot-assisted surgical tasks, Hamlyn Compact Robotic Master (Hamlyn CRM) is built up and evaluated in this paper. METHODS: A compact structure for the master manipulator is proposed. A novel sensing system is designed while stable real-time motion tracking can be realized by fusing the information from multiple sensors. User studies were conducted based on a ring transfer task and a needle passing task to explore a suitable mapping strategy for the compact master manipulator to control a surgical robot remotely. The overall usability of the Hamlyn CRM is verified based on the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK). The master manipulators of the dVRK control console are used as the reference RESULTS: Motion tracking experiments verified that the proposed system can track the operators’ hand motion precisely. As for the master–slave mapping strategy, user studies proved that the combination of the position relative mapping mode and the orientation absolute mapping mode is suitable for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RAMIS), while key parameters for mapping are selected. CONCLUSION: Results indicated that the Hamlyn CRM can serve as a compact master manipulator for surgical training and has potential applications for RAMIS.