In endoscopy, the standard procedure for controlling the endoscope has been indirect and, therefore, not ideal. In recent studies, a solution has been sought to provide the surgeon with the ability to have full control over the control procedure. One example of this is having a head controlled soft robotic endoscope. Here, the surgeon can control the end effector of the endoscope with head movement while being provided with visual feedback and a form of haptic feedback.
A study conducted by Mak et al. has compared several different haptic feedback methods in terms of the average bending error with respect to a planned path and the user-friendliness of the methods. This study was conducted with the use of a silicon-based soft endoscope actuator. Now, an origami-based actuator has been developed which is more stiff and will therefore have to be actuated in a different manner. It is therefore interesting to us to evaluate the accuracy of this new origami based actuator. To do this, the experimental conditions have to be as similar as possible, which means that the actuator also has to be head controlled and the same haptic feedback methods have to be applied, visual or vibrational for example.
With this setup, several participants will be asked to follow the same planned 20 path as with the previous study to follow this as precisely as possible. The resulting data can be used to plot the average bending error of the endoscope end effector with regard to the planned path. This error can be compared to that of the previous study to answer to question: "How does the use of an origami-based endoscope with head-mounted control and haptic feedback influence the accuracy during robotic navigation?"