TOWARDS THE AUTOTUNING OF FORCE-FEEDBACK TELEOPERATORS

Force feedback teleoperation has undoubtly potential applications in the field of medical robotics. However, the lack of force feedback of most existing systems does not allow the physicians to teleoperate their surgical tools as accurately as they can. To obtain stable and transparent force feedback, most existing techniques are based on strong assumptions on the passivity of the system. They generally lead to stable but conservative laws that decrease the quality of force rendering, specially in the case of nonlinear interactions. In this paper we present an autotuning PID method to give adapted force feedback to any operator. Results are given in the context of percutaneous needle insertion.