  Robotic surgery has reached a high level of maturity and has become an
integral part of standard surgical care. However, existing surgeon consoles are
bulky and take up valuable space in the operating room, present challenges for
surgical team coordination, and their proprietary nature makes it difficult to
take advantage of recent technological advances, especially in virtual and
augmented reality. One potential area for further improvement is the
integration of modern sensory gloves into robotic platforms, allowing surgeons
to control robotic arms directly with their hand movements intuitively. We
propose one such system that combines an HTC Vive tracker, a Manus Meta Prime 3
XR sensory glove, and God Vision wireless smart glasses. The system controls
one arm of a da Vinci surgical robot. In addition to moving the arm, the
surgeon can use fingers to control the end-effector of the surgical instrument.
Hand gestures are used to implement clutching and similar functions. In
particular, we introduce clutching of the instrument orientation, a
functionality not available in the da Vinci system. The vibrotactile elements
of the glove are used to provide feedback to the user when gesture commands are
invoked. A preliminary evaluation of the system shows that it has excellent
tracking accuracy and allows surgeons to efficiently perform common surgical
training tasks with minimal practice with the new interface; this suggests that
the interface is highly intuitive. The proposed system is inexpensive, allows
rapid prototyping, and opens opportunities for further innovations in the
design of surgical robot interfaces.
