Abstract
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.
Highlights
T HE field of surgical robotics has undergone a considerable evolution in recent years
Surgical robotic systems are teleoperated by the surgeon, as is the case for the Da Vinci by Intuitive Surgical [1] and with the DLR MiroSurge [2]
The goal of this paper is to present a passivity-based interactive control architecture that allows one to implement stable time-varying interactive behaviors and transient-free kinematically compensated bilateral teleoperation of a robotic platform
Summary
T HE field of surgical robotics has undergone a considerable evolution in recent years. The goal of this paper is to present a passivity-based interactive control architecture that allows one to implement stable time-varying interactive behaviors and transient-free kinematically compensated bilateral teleoperation of a robotic platform. Persistent oscillations and diverging behaviors must be avoided and the reaction time of the system must be as fast as possible, without introducing instability To achieve this aim, we will exploit the port-Hamiltonian framework [8] for modeling the surgical robotic architecture and the concept of energy tanks [9], [10] that allows to use the (virtual) energy circulating in the controlled system in a flexible and passivity preserving way. A novel flexible and passivity-based teleoperation architecture that ensures a stable switch between autonomous and teleoperated modes and compensates for the kinematic mismatch between the master and the slave (i.e. the surgical robot).
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