Endoscopic nasal surgery is with minimal invasiveness for the surgical treatment of nasal disease. During traditional functional endoscopic sinus surgery (FESS), the surgeon uses one hand to hold the surgical instrument leaving the other hand to hold the endoscope. When the surgeon needs to use two hands to perform some complex procedure, an assistant surgeon is required to help holding the endoscope, and this requires good teamwork and long-time training. To solve this problem, researchers proposed to use robots to hold the endoscope, freeing the surgeon’s hands for bimanual operation. Sun developed a passive arm with pneumatic locking mechanism to hold the endoscope in FESS, but the surgeon needs to adjust the pose of the endoscope manually, which interrupts the surgery flow and lengthens the surgery time [1]. Many motor-driven endoscope holders have been proposed in literature [2], the surgeon interact with the robot with joystick, voice command, pedals or head movement [3–5]. However, there exists some drawbacks with these interacting methods, for example, joystick requires one of the surgeon’s hands, voice command is usually subject to interference and has long time-delay, foot pedals and head movement distract surgeon’s attention. Lin used a foot-attached IMU sensor to control an active robotic endoscopic holder, the inversion/eversion and abduction/adduction motions of foot are used to select and control different joints, but the motor can be only selected in order, which is unhandy for the four-joint scenario [6].
In this paper, a similar foot-attached IMU sensor is used, and the joints are selected in an easier manner, based on the angle of plantarflexion. Rather than the angle, the angular velocity of abduction/adduction is utilized to control the moving direction of the active joint. This paper describes the test result of the proposed control interface.
