Physical Human-Robot Collaboration-Assisted Acetabular Preparation for Total Hip Replacement Surgery
Ziqi Wang, Tiancheng Li, Marc G. Carmichael, Shoudong Huang
Abstract
When performing total hip replacement (THR) surgery, high-quality preparation of acetabulum is critical as it contributes to the patient’s recovery speed and the consistency of bone ingrowth. Conventionally, surgeons prepare the acetabulum manually by reaming it with a handheld electric drill and a reamer. It not only increases the surgeon’s workload but more importantly, it is difficult to control the reaming depth and direction accurately. Utilizing an admittance-controlled (AC) collaborative robot (cobot) to enable physical human-robot collaboration (pHRC) possesses a promising solution. For primitive AC, a compromise must be made between compliance and task accuracy. In this paper, we present a novel variable admittance control (VAC) design that considers the reactive force of bone while ensuring the passivity and stability of the system during pHRC-assisted acetabular preparation. The qualitative results show that VAC was more desirable by users than the conventional manual reaming method. Compared to other pHRC controls, quantitative results on user energy consumption, reaming error, and smoothness showed the proposed VAC can achieve a balance between physical workload and acetabular quality. Compared to manual reaming, VAC reduced the reaming error by 67.47% and improved the final acetabulum surface smoothness by 18.30%.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2025_physicalhumanrob,
title = {Physical Human-Robot Collaboration-Assisted Acetabular Preparation for Total Hip Replacement Surgery},
author = {Ziqi Wang and Tiancheng Li and Marc G. Carmichael and Shoudong Huang},
booktitle = {IROS 2025},
year = {2025}
}