Title
Kinematic Design of an Ophthalmic Surgery Robot and Feature Extracting Bilateral Manipulation

Abstract
Part I of this work describes a parallel manipulator design aid. From the jacobian, which maps perturbations in joint space to resultant perturbations in endpoint coordinates, the sensitivity vector is derived. This is accomplished by concatenating the one-norms of the rows of the jacobian. The sensitivity vector can be monitored as geometric design parameters are varied, yielding a concise display of changes in end effector motion characteristics over a variety of kinematic configurations. The design procedure is applied to an ophthalmic surgery micromanipulator used for micropuncture of retinal vessels, but is sufficiently general for use in the design of any parallel manipulator.

Part II addresses issues in teleoperation. It is often suggested in the literature, with regard to force-reflecting bilateral manipulation, that the ideal bilateral controller would provide the operator with a sense of direct manipulation of the remote envi onment. This dissertation is one of a few recent works which suggest that unfaithful reflection of slave/task interaction to the master manipulator can lead to a more useful teleoperation tool yielding greater remote task success for the operator. Several feature extractors, which recognize and react to the traversal of task impedance boundaries, are presented here. Results of human subject experiments, which compare puncture task performance using a bilateral manipulation tool with and without feature extractors, show superior task success metrics with the feature extractors in place.

Source: Dissertation, Northwestern University; 1995