Surgical Cockpit -- Multisensory/Multimodal Interfaces for Robotic Surgery

The ongoing military conflicts demonstrate the need to deploy skilled personnel equipped with advanced technology to provide medical and surgical attention as close as possible to the point of injury. A major problem is the occasional mismatch between the type of injury and the type of surgeon available to treat it. Telerobotic surgery is a means to mediate the narrow spectrum of available front line surgical expertise. To date, most R & D efforts on medical robotics for the battlefield have focused on the remote site (the manipulator) with little focus on the critical man-machine interface which is the surgical console. The objective of the proposed project is to develop, fabricate, integrate, and experimentally demonstrate the functionality of a multimodal surgical cockpit (surgical console) enabling telesurgery capabilities which expand the range of surgical expertise to the level dictated by the type and nature of wounds in the battlefield. Through the proposed cockpit, the one or multiple expert surgeons located in the continental US will be able to collaborate while interface with different manufacturers"end effector robots through a universal interface and perform a surgical procedures on solider located anywhere around the globe with a reduced workload and enhanced situational awareness. While the proposed surgical cockpit will be designed specifically for controlling surgical manipulators, it can also provide a unique and innovative console design elements which could be beneficial to all warriors using remote systems, such as UAV, UGV, etc.