Introducing some form of autonomy in robotic surgery is being considered by the medical community to better exploit the potential of robots in the operating room. However, significant technological steps have to occur before even the smallest autonomous task is ready to be presented to the regulatory authorities. In this paper, we address the initial steps of this process, in particular the development of control concepts satisfying the basic safety requirements of robotic surgery, i.e., providing the robot with the necessary dexterity and a stable and smooth behavior of the surgical tool. Two specific situations are considered: the automatic adaptation to changing tissue stiffness and the transition from autonomous to teleoperated mode. These situations replicate real-life cases when the surgeon adapts the stiffness of her/his arm to penetrate tissues of different consistency and when, due to an unexpected event, the surgeon has to take over the control of the surgical robot. To address the first case, we propose a passivity-based interactive control architecture that allows us to implement stable time-varying interactive behaviors. For the second case, we present a two-layered bilateral control architecture that ensures a stable behavior during the transition between autonomy and teleoperation and, after the switch, limits the effect of initial mismatch between master and slave poses. The proposed solutions are validated in the realistic surgical scenario developed within the EU-funded I-SUR project, using a surgical robot prototype specifically designed for the autonomous execution of surgical tasks like the insertion of needles into the human body
The paper describes a passivity based approach\ud to the generation of virtual fixtures for robotic teleoperation\ud schemes involving multiple masters and multiple slaves. Virtual\ud fixtures considered in the paper aim to guide the user towards a\ud geometric path, which is assumed to be collision-free by design,\ud describing a desired execution of a given task. To preserve safe\ud distance from obstacles and at the same time suggest the user\ud a preferred direction to progress along the path, the virtual\ud fixtures are generated by arbitrarily redirecting assistive forces\ud obtained by summation of attractive and repulsive potential\ud fields. The main result of the paper is the definition of a\ud passivity preserving condition for this redirection, so that the\ud behavior of the teleoperated systems remains safe and stable.\ud The proposed assisted mode of teleoperation has been tested\ud on a surgical robot prototype with dual arms configuration,\ud since robotic surgery represents a suitable application domain\ud for such control schemes
The introduction of robotic surgery within the operating rooms has significantly improved the quality of many surgical procedures. Recently, the research on medical robotic systems focused on increasing the level of autonomy in order to give them the possibility to carry out simple surgical actions autonomously. This paper reports on the development of technologies for introducing automation within the surgical workflow. The results have been obtained during the ongoing FP7 European funded project Intelligent Surgical Robotics (I-SUR). The main goal of the project is to demonstrate that autonomous robotic surgical systems can carry out simple surgical tasks effectively and without major intervention by surgeons. To fulfil this goal, we have developed innovative solutions (both in terms of technologies and algorithms) for the following aspects: fabrication of soft organ models starting from CT images, surgical planning and execution of movement of robot arms in contact with a deformable environment, designing a surgical interface minimizing the cognitive load of the surgeon supervising the actions, intra-operative sensing and reasoning to detect normal transitions and unexpected events. All these technologies have been integrated using a component-based software architecture to control a novel robot designed to perform the surgical actions under study. In this work we provide an overview of our system and report on preliminary results of the automatic execution of needle insertion for the cryoablation of kidney tumours.
The paper describes a motion planning and control\ud software architecture developed for the automation of a\ud surgical robot. The considered surgical robot is a dual-arm\ud prototype developed with a redundant and modular mechanical\ud structure, designed to be reconfigured for different surgical\ud tasks, and with a hybrid parallel/serial kinematics. The motion\ud planning solution proposed in the paper includes both an online\ud collision-free path planner, based on the RRT-Connect algorithm,\ud and a generator of predefined motion primitives. This\ud solution allows the multi-arm robot to autonomously execute\ud the complex motion patterns required for a suturing task. Since\ud such motion patterns are specified in the Cartesian space, an\ud efficient and univocal solution of the inverse kinematics of\ud the robot, which is a challenging problem due to its hybrid\ud structure, is another crucial issue addressed in the paper
The research on medical robotics is starting to address the autonomous execution of surgical tasks, without effective intervention of humans apart from supervision and task configuration. This paper addresses the complete automation of a surgical robot by combining advanced sensing, cognition and control capabilities, developed according to rigorous assessment of surgical require- ments, formal specification of robotic system behavior and software design and implementation based on solid tools and frame- works. In particular, the paper focuses on the cognitive control architecture and its development process, based on formal modeling and verification methods as best practices to ensure safe and reliable behavior. Full implementation of the proposed architecture has been tested on an experimental setup including a novel robot specifically designed for surgical applications, but adaptable to different selected tasks (i.e. needle insertion, wound suturing)
In autonomous robotic surgery, the supervision of the surgeon cannot be avoided due to the unforeseenable emergencies and complications that can take place during an operation. When necessary, the surgeon has to take over the surgical system switching it from an autonomous mode to a teleoperation mode. In this paper we propose a two-layer bilateral control architecture that ensures a safe behavior during the switch and high performance during the teleoperation. Experiments are proposed for validating the architecture proposed in the paper
This contribution describes the application of differential geometry and nonlinear systems analysis to the estimation of friction effects in a class of mechanical systems. The proposed methodology, that has been developed for the more general problem of fault detection and diagnosis, relies on adaptive filters designed with a nonlinear geometric approach to obtain the disturbance de-coupling property. The classical model of an inverted pendulum on a cart is considered as an application example, in order to highlight the complete design procedure, including the mathematical aspects of the disturbance de-coupling method as well as the feasibility and the efficiency of the approach. Thanks to accurate estimation, friction effects can also be compensated by means of a controller designed to inject the on-line estimate of friction force to the control action calculated by classical linear state feedback. This strategy, which belongs to the class of so-called Active Fault-Tolerant Control Schemes, allows to maintain existing controllers and enhance their performance by introducing an adaptive estimator of unmodeled friction forces
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