Research on telesurgery with a bonesetting system over the Internet

Safety undoubtedly is important in telesurgery systems. Force feedback is assumed to enhance performance in robotic surgery and even render some tasks feasible but it is hard to control. Huge and unpredictable time delay over the Internet may induce close-loop control to be unstable. The use of QOS (Quality of Service) networks and protocols is proved to be an effective means in ensuring the safety of telesurgery, but current Internet is unstable, for example, variable time delay and package losses. TCP is a more reliable protocol than UDP, but UDP is proved to be the better protocol used in real-time case than TCP. So using different protocol for different data is necessary in telesurgery. Supervisory control and predictor display are proved to be effective methods in time delay compensation. In order to ensure force-feedback system stable, event-based and wave variable method are used. Based on such rules above, prototype of a bonesetting system is constructed.