Review of surgical robotic systems for keyhole and endoscopic procedures: state of the art and perspectives.

Minimally invasive surgery, including laparoscopic and thoracoscopic procedures, benefits patients in terms of improved postoperative outcomes and short recovery time. The challenges in hand-eye coordination and manipulation dexterity during the aforementioned procedures have inspired an enormous wave of developments on surgical robotic systems to assist keyhole and endoscopic procedures in the past decades. This paper presents a systematic review of the state-of-the-art systems, picturing a detailed landscape of the system configurations, actuation schemes, and control approaches of the existing surgical robotic systems for keyhole and endoscopic procedures.

CombX: Design and experimental characterizations of a haptic device for surgical teleoperation.

Background: Haptic devices with active translation and orientation outputs are highly preferred in surgical teleoperation. However, commercial products are expensive, while state-of-the-art research prototypes are difficult to reproduce outside the original laboratories.

Methods: This paper presents the design and experimental characterizations of two styluses for the CombX, a haptic device with both force and torque outputs constructed from two TouchX haptic devices, which have only force outputs at their styluses.