A Handheld Master Controller for Robot-Assisted Microsurgery

Accurate master-slave control is important for Robot-Assisted Microsurgery (RAMS). This paper presents a handheld master controller for the operation and training of RAMS. A 9-axis Inertial Measure Unit (IMU) and a micro camera are utilized to form the sensing system for the handheld controller. A new hybrid marker pattern is designed to achieve reliable visual tracking, which integrated QR codes, Aruco markers, and chessboard vertices. Real-time multi-sensor fusion is implemented to further improve the tracking accuracy. The proposed handheld controller has been verified on an in-house microsurgical robot to assess its usability and robustness. User studies were conducted based on a trajectory following task, which indicated that the proposed handheld controller had comparable performance with the Phantom Omni, demonstrating its potential applications in microsurgical robot control and training.