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Many surgical tasks require using three or more tools simultaneously. Currently, surgeries are typically performed by a main surgeon and an assistant, where it is known that their performance can be affected by miscommunications. Providing the surgeon with tools and techniques to control three or four surgical tools by themself would avoid miscommunication and could improve the outcome of surgery. However, the current interfaces allowing a surgeon to control several tools offer only limited precision, dexterity and intuitiveness. Therefore, I developed a dedicated foot interface and techniques that allow an operator to control three tools intuitively and continuously. Using individual motion patterns, the operator could simultaneously control a novel flexible endoscope and its two tools, as was tested in an intervention on a pig stomach. In addition, I used my interface to systematically investigate the main characteristics, opportunities and limitations of movement augmentation for "three-handed manipulation". In my presentation, I will present these works and outline the opportunities that movement augmentation opens up for applications in industry and medicine, especially for solo surgery.
Dr. Yanpei Huang (Human Robotics Group of Imperial College London)
Dr. Yanpei HUANG’s main research interests are in the development of intuitive human-machine interaction and medical robotics. Yanpei earned a BSc in mechanical design, manufacturing and automation from Southwest University, China. She started graduate studies at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, where she obtained an MSc in manufacturing systems and engineering in 2016. During her Ph.D. at NTU, she developed interfaces and techniques to enable a surgeon controlling a soft endoscope with two tools without requiring an assistant. In 2020, she joined Imperial College London as a post-doctoral Research Associate in the Human Robotics Group, where she investigates movement augmentation strategies in Virtual Reality.