MINARO DRS: usability study of a robotic-assisted laminectomy.

Purpose: Although the literature shows that robotic assistance can support the surgeon, robotic systems are not widely spread in clinics. They often incorporate large robotic arms adopted from the manufacturing industry, imposing safety hazards when in contact with the patient or surgical staff. We approached this limitation with a modular dual robot consisting of an ultra-lightweight carrier robot for rough prepositioning and small, highly dynamic, application-specific, interchangeable tooling robots.

Safe design of surgical robots - a systematic approach to comprehensive hazard identification.

Objectives: Since the 1980s, robotic arms have been transferred from industrial applications to orthopaedic surgical robotics. Adverse events are frequent and often associated with the adopted powerful and oversized anthropomorphic arms. The FDA's 510(k) pathway encourages building on such systems, leading to the adoption of hazards, which is known as "predicate creep".

MINARO HD: control and evaluation of a handheld, highly dynamic surgical robot.

Purpose: Current surgical robotic systems are either large serial arms, resulting in higher risks due to their high inertia and no inherent limitations of the working space, or they are bone-mounted, adding substantial additional task steps to the surgical workflow. The robot presented in this paper has a handy and lightweight design and can be easily held by the surgeon. No rigid fixation to the bone or a cart is necessary.

Usability of cooperative surgical telemanipulation for bone milling tasks.

Purpose: Cooperative surgical systems enable humans and machines to combine their individual strengths and collaborate to improve the surgical outcome. Cooperative telemanipulated systems offer the widest spectrum of cooperative functionalities, because motion scaling is possible. Haptic guidance can be used to assist surgeons and haptic feedback makes acting forces at the slave side transparent to the operator, however, overlapping and masking of forces needs to be avoided.