Advanced Mathematics Assists Remote Surgery

Advanced mathematics is being used to build a "haptic interface” that will allow a surgeon to feel the same forces on his surgical tools as if he was actually performing the operation on the patient.

The new interface is being developed by researchers at Quanser Consulting (Markham, Canada). When completed, the surgeon could control the robotic arm more accurately by responding to realistic sensations that the robot would be feeling. This feedback sensation can improve the performance of the surgeon significantly.

However, to achieve this, the researchers need to model very delicate movements of tiny servomotors that could control the way the interface responds to a surgeon's movement. These simulations would be too difficult, and take too much time, to be modeled manually, so the team is using a mathematical software suite called Maple to solve the complex systems of differential equations needed to model the kinematics and dynamics of the system. Once solved, the team could then develop the necessary control strategies from within Maple itself.

Maple, developed by Maplesoft (Waterloo, Canada), is an all purpose mathematics software tool that provides an advanced, high performance mathematical computation engine with fully integrated numerics & symbolics, all accessible from a WYSIWYG--what you see is what you get-- technical document environment. Live math is expressed in its natural two-dimensional (2D) typeset notation, linked to state-of-the-art graphics and animations with full document editing and presentation control.


Related Links:
Quanser Consulting
Maplesoft