Surgical robots have revolutionized the minimally invasive surgery field by offering surgeons increased precision and dexterity. However, most existing training platforms require expensive and unwieldy control mechanisms, limiting their availability and convenience. The development of a low-cost and easily deployed control console can address these limitations, thereby potentially enhancing the effectiveness of robotic surgery training. This application can also be used to advance surgical robotics research in low-resource environments. This work aims to develop a novel mobile application that allows for the control of a surgical robot using a smartphone. 

The mobile application was designed and implemented to establish a wireless connection with the surgical robot system. A user-friendly interface was developed, offering intuitive controls and real-time feedback. The application's functionality includes controlling robotic arms and jaw angles. The app also includes a button that mimics the clutch of a da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK). A group of novices participated in the evaluation phase, performing movement tasks using the mobile application and the dVRK traditional control interface. Surgical performance metrics, including task completion times and accuracy, were measured and compared.

The evaluation revealed that surgeons using the mobile application exhibited comparable performance in terms of accuracy but not task completion time when compared to the traditional control interface. Nevertheless, we believe the application still has merit as a low-cost and readily available input device for surgical robotic training, as well as for facilitating medical robotics research in low-resource settings, as these are not time-sensitive use cases.