Appeal No. 2004-0278 Page 5
Application No. 09/626,362
surgical manipulator 51 and a 3D position sensor 52. The manipulator 51 has a
structure similar to the slave manipulators 3 and 4 incorporated in the embodiment
shown in Figure 1. The manipulator 51 is secured to one side of an operating table and
is controlled in the same way as either slave manipulator used in the first embodiment.
The 3D position sensor 52 is one designed to remote-control a manipulator, and is used
to remote-control the surgical manipulator 51. To state more precisely, the sensor 52
comprises a source coil 53 and a sense coil 54. Either coil is substantially a cube and
has three coil elements wound around three orthogonal axes, for generating and
receiving magnetic fields. A drive circuit (not shown) supplies pulse currents, one after
another, to the coil elements of the source coil 53. The three coil elements of the
source coil 53 generate three reference magnetic fields in the space occupied by the
surgical manipulator system, as shown in Figure 13. Hence, the coil elements
constitute a transmitting section. The sense coil 54 detects the reference magnetic
fields generated by the source coil 53 and determines its own position and orientation.
Hence, the sense coil 54 functions as a receiving section. Both coils 53 and 54, or at
least the sense coil 54 is small enough to be gripped with the hand 56 as illustrated in
Figure 11. Alternatively, the sense coil 54 may be fixed to the HMD (Head Mounted
Display) which the surgeon wears, so that the slave manipulator may be operated as
the surgeon's head moves.
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