Surgical Master Console Using General-Purpose Robot Arms and a Separable Articulated Distal Interface: Porcine In-Vivo Evaluation

Minsung Kim; Seonho Shim; Dongho Yee; Younghoon Noh; Juahn Oh; Yechan Seo; Jinseok Lee; Jiyul Lee; Seong Jeong; Hyuk Choi; Youngbin Kong; Hyoun-Joong Kong

arXiv · 2609.37455

Surgical Master Console Using General-Purpose Robot Arms and a Separable Articulated Distal Interface: Porcine In-Vivo Evaluation

Minsung Kim·Seonho Shim·Dongho Yee·Younghoon Noh·Juahn Oh·Yechan Seo·Jinseok Lee·Jiyul Lee·Seong Jeong·Hyuk Choi·Youngbin Kong·Hyoun-Joong Kong

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Abstract

High-performance surgical master consoles offer intuitive articulated manipulation but are expensive and difficult to reproduce, while accessible commercial haptic devices lack built-in interfaces for surgical wrist articulation and continuous grasp. We present a laparoscopic master in which general-purpose robot manipulators provide the programmable base and surgical-specific interaction is concentrated in a separable distal adapter. Each 6-DoF arm carries a custom 2-DoF direct-drive wrist, continuous grasp sensing, and clutch-based workspace management; the complete bimanual hardware costs approximately US$5,500, below common bimanual commercial haptic references. To support sustained hand-guided use, we characterize current scaling, gravity, and break-away friction and use them for posture-dependent gravity compensation and motion-gated assistance, reducing continuous actuation and thermal loading. A common master state drives either Isaac Sim or an RCM-constrained dual-FR3 platform. Master-state publication to FR3 target update adds at most 8 ms, and tip tracking shows 0.31-0.66 mm mean delay-aligned residuals. In a porcine cholecystectomy experiment, five common operator-side metrics and hand/tip-speed distributions were compared descriptively with human in-vivo telemetry from 120 clinical Versius recordings of 99 cholecystectomy procedures; no interruption originated from the master console, and no abnormal clinical signs were recorded during the 7-day postoperative observation period. These results demonstrate a surgical master built from general-purpose robot arms with surgical-specific interaction concentrated in a separable distal interface.

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Minsung Kim, Seonho Shim, Dongho Yee, Younghoon Noh, Juahn Oh, Yechan Seo, Jinseok Lee, Jiyul Lee, Seong Jeong, Hyuk Choi, Youngbin Kong, Hyoun-Joong Kong. 2026-09-27. Surgical Master Console Using General-Purpose Robot Arms and a Separable Articulated Distal Interface: Porcine In-Vivo Evaluation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37455

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