Robot application in orthopedic surgery: drilling control

Abstract

Many orthopedic operations involve drilling and tapping before the insertion of screws into bone. Usually the drilling is executed by hand. It leads to lots of problems. The accuracy of the drilling, braking the blood vessels after the rear hole, overheating, oscillations widening the hole diameter are some of examples for that. To avoid these problems and to reduce the subjective factor the automation of drilling is recommended. In the work the automatic drilling robot is presented as well as experiments for establishment the drilling process technical parameters and its control. The time, linear velocity, angular velocity, resistant force, depth of penetration and temperature are monitored during the drilling process. The robot is user-friendly, i.e. the surgeon can operate easy. The required working task is set simply and the information during the process execution is received in real time. The surgeon has no influence to the process. He must only to take care of keeping a contact with a bone while the robot autonomously executes the drilling and takes a decision to stop. Conclusions are made that the automatic bone drilling assures higher accuracy and patient safety.