Robot-based tele-echography: the TER system.

This paper presents a master-slave robotized system enabling a remote echographic diagnosis. The expert holds a virtual probe placed on a haptic device; he moves this virtual probe in order to control the motion of the real probe positioned on the body of the patient located remotely. The real probe is placed on a lightweight and user-friendly slave robot and moved by it. The contact force between the probe and the patient is fed back to the operator allowing him to have a haptic virtual environment. The aim of this haptic control is to preserve the medical expert proprioception in order to the facilitate hand-eye coordination necessary to echographic examination. In this paper we present the architecture of the system and experimental results.