Needle-based interventions are pervasive in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), and are often used in a number of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, including biopsy and brachytherapy seed placement. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) which can provide high quality, real time and high soft tissue contrast imaging, is an ideal guidance tool for image-guided therapy (IGT). Therefore, a MRI-guided needle-based surgical robot proves to have great potential in the application of percutaneous interventions. Presented here is the design of reconfigurable fiducial-integrated modular needle driver for MRI-guided percutaneous interventions. Further, an MRI-compatible hardware control system has been developed and enhanced to drive piezoelectric ultrasonic motors for a previously developed base robot designed to support the modular needle driver. A further contribution is the development of a fiber optic sensing system to detect robot position and joint limits. A transformer printed circuit board (PCB) and an interface board with integrated fiber optic limit sensing have been developed and tested to integrate the robot with the piezoelectric actuator control system designed by AIM Lab for closed loop control of ultrasonic Shinsei motors. A series of experiments were performed to evaluate the feasibility and accuracy of the modular needle driver. Bench top tests were conducted to validate the transformer board, fiber optic limit sensing and interface board in a lab environment. Finally, the whole robot control system was tested inside the MRI room to evaluate its MRI compatibility and stability.

Le travail mené dans cette thèse est une contribution au développement mécatronique d'interfaces haptiques pour un système de télé-opération dédié aux applications médicales du type chirurgie mini-invasive. Dans un premier temps, nous avons mené une évaluation d'une interface « maître » existante, ayant une architecture parallèle sphérique et développée au sein de l'équipe robotique de l'Institut PPRIME. Cette évaluation a montré la présence de singularités, en particulier des singularités parallèles, à l'intérieur de l'espace du travail de l'interface. La présence de singularités altère le comportement cinématique en amplifiant les erreurs de résolution du modèle géométrique direct d'une part et les couples actionneurs lors du retour d'effort d'autre part. Dans un deuxième temps, différentes approches ont été proposées pour résoudre les problèmes liés à la présence des singularités. La première approche a consisté à utiliser la redondance de capteurs et la redondance d'actionneurs pour palier à ces effets dans la structure existante. Dans la seconde approche, nous avons proposé une nouvelle architecture mécanique optimale qui élimine les singularités présentent dans l'espace de travail. Les résultats obtenus, avec cette nouvelle structure à travers les essais expérimentaux réalisés sur le prototype, sont conformes aux objectifs fixés. Les deux interfaces haptiques ont été utilisées pour contrôler avec succès un robot dédié à la chirurgie mini-invasive. Le comportement du système global « robot esclave interface haptique » ouvre des perspectives prometteuses aussi bien pour de futures études scientifiques que pour un transfert industriel. / A contribution for a development of haptic devices for tele-operation system is presented in this thesis. This device is dedicated for medical applications such as minimally invasive surgery tasks. In one first step, an evaluation of the existing master device is carried out. This device has a spherical parallel architecture and has been developed within the robotics team of PPRIME Institute. The evaluation of this device has shown the presence of parallel singularities located in its workspace. This singularity alters the kinematic behavior of the structure by amplifying the errors in solving the forward kinematics and amplifying the actuator torques for the haptic feedback. In a second step, different approaches have been proposed to solve the problems related to the presence of the singularities. The first approach consists in using redundancy of sensors and actuators for the existing structure in order to overcome the effects of singularities. In the second approach, we have proposed a new optimal mechanical architecture that eliminates the singularity. The results obtained with this new structure through the experimental testing of the prototype, are in accordance with the expected ones. The two haptic devices have been used to successfully control a robot dedicated to minimally invasive surgery. The behavior of the overall system "robot and haptic device" opens up promising prospects for future studies as well as for industrial transfer.