Robot Autonomy for Surgery

Autonomous surgery involves having surgical tasks performed by a robot operating under its own will, with partial or no human involvement. There are several important advantages of automation in surgery, which include increasing precision of care due to sub-millimeter robot control, real-time utilization of biosignals for interventional care, improvements to surgical efficiency and execution, and computer-aided guidance under various medical imaging and sensing modalities. While these methods may displace some tasks of surgical teams and individual surgeons, they also present new capabilities in interventions that are too difficult or go beyond the skills of a human. In this chapter, we provide an overview of robot autonomy in commercial use and in research, and present some of the challenges faced in developing autonomous surgical robots

Force Measurement Methods in Telerobotic Surgery: Implications for End-Effector Manufacture

Haptic feedback in telesurgical applications refers to the relaying of position and force information from a remote surgical site to the surgeon in real-time during a surgical procedure. This feedback, coupled with visual information via microscopic cameras, has the potential to provide the surgeon with additional ‘feel’ for the manipulations being performed at the instrument-biological tissue interface. This increased sensitivity has many associated benefits which include, but are not limited to; minimal tissue damage, reduced recuperation periods, and less patient trauma. The inclusion of haptic feedback leads to reduction in surgeon fatigue which contributes to enhanced performance during operation. Commercially available Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgical (MIRS) systems are being widely used, the best-known examples being from the daVinci® by Intuitive Surgical Inc. However, currently these systems do not possess force feedback capability which therefore restricts their use during many delicate and complex procedures. The ideal system would consist of a multi-degree-of-freedom framework which includes end-effector instruments with embedded force sensing included. A force sensing characterisation platform has been developed by this group which facilitates the evaluation of force sensing technologies. Surgical scissors have been chosen as the instrument and biological tissue phantom specimens have been used during testing. This test-bed provides accurate, repeatable measurements of the forces produced at the interface between the tissue and the scissor blades during cutting using conventional sensing technologies. The primary focus of this paper is to provide a review of the traditional and developing force sensing technologies with a view to establishing the most appropriate solution for this application. The impact that an appropriate sensing technology has on the manufacturability of the instrument end-effector is considered. Particular attention is given to the issues of embedding the force sensing transducer into the instrument tip

Vision based virtual fixture generation for teleoperated robotic manipulation

In this paper we present a vision-based system for online virtual fixture generation suitable for manipulation tasks using remote controlled robots. This system makes use of a stereo camera system which provides accurate pose estimation of parts within the surrounding environment of the robot using features detection algorithms. The proposed approach is suitable for fast adaptation of the teleoperation system to different manipulation tasks without the need of tedious reimplementation of virtual constraints. Our main goal is to improve the efficiency of bilateral teleoperation systems by reducing the human operator effort in programming the system. In fact, using this method virtual guidances do not need to be programmed a priori but they can be instead dynamically generated on-the-fly and updated at any time making, in the end, the system suitable for any unstructured environment. In addition, this methodology is easily adaptable to any kind of teleoperation system since it is independent from the used master/slave robots. In order to validate our approach we performed a series of experiments in an emulated industrial scenario. We show how through the use of our approach a generic telemanipulation task can be easily accomplished without influencing the transparency of the system

Network Performance Measurement through Machine to Machine Communication in Tele-Robotics System

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication devices communicate and exchange information with each other in an independent manner to perform necessary tasks. The machine communicates with another machine over a wireless network. Wireless communication opens up the environment to huge vulnerabilities, making it very easy for hackers to gain access to sensitive information and carry out malicious actions. This paper proposes an M2M communication system through the internet in Tele-Robotics and provides network performance security. Tele-robotic systems are designed for surgery, treatment and diagnostics to be conducted across short or long distances while utilizing wireless communication networks. The systems also provide a low delay and secure communication system for the tele-robotics community and data security. The system can perform tasks autonomously and intelligently, minimizing the burden on medical staff and improving the quality and system performance of patient care. In the medical field, surgeons and patients are located at different places and connected through public networks. So the design of a medical sensor node network with LEACH protocol for secure and reliable communication ensures through the attack and without attack performance. Finally, the simulation results show low delay and reliable secure network transmission

Haptic guidance for microrobotic intracellular injection

The ability for a bio-operator to utilise a haptic device to manipulate a microrobot for intracellular injection offers immense benefits. One significant benefit is for the bio-operator to receive haptic guidance while performing the injection process. In order to address this, this paper investigates the use of haptic virtual fixtures for cell injection and proposes a novel force field virtual fixture. The guidance force felt by the bio-operator is determined by force field analysis within the virtual fixture. The proposed force field virtual fixture assists the bio-operator when performing intracellular injection by limiting the micropipette tip\u27s motion to a conical volume as well as recommending the desired path for optimal injection. A virtual fixture plane is also introduced to prevent the bio-operator from moving the micropipette tip beyond the deposition target inside the cell. Simulation results demonstrate the operation of the guidance system.<br /

Haptics in Robot-Assisted Surgery: Challenges and Benefits

Robotic surgery is transforming the current surgical practice, not only by improving the conventional surgical methods but also by introducing innovative robot-enhanced approaches that broaden the capabilities of clinicians. Being mainly of man-machine collaborative type, surgical robots are seen as media that transfer pre- and intra-operative information to the operator and reproduce his/her motion, with appropriate filtering, scaling, or limitation, to physically interact with the patient. The field, however, is far from maturity and, more critically, is still a subject of controversy in medical communities. Limited or absent haptic feedback is reputed to be among reasons that impede further spread of surgical robots. In this paper objectives and challenges of deploying haptic technologies in surgical robotics is discussed and a systematic review is performed on works that have studied the effects of providing haptic information to the users in major branches of robotic surgery. It has been tried to encompass both classical works and the state of the art approaches, aiming at delivering a comprehensive and balanced survey both for researchers starting their work in this field and for the experts

Telelocomotion—remotely operated legged robots

© 2020 by the authors. Li-censee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Teleoperated systems enable human control of robotic proxies and are particularly amenable to inaccessible environments unsuitable for autonomy. Examples include emergency response, underwater manipulation, and robot assisted minimally invasive surgery. However, teleoperation architectures have been predominantly employed in manipulation tasks, and are thus only useful when the robot is within reach of the task. This work introduces the idea of extending teleoperation to enable online human remote control of legged robots, or telelocomotion, to traverse challenging terrain. Traversing unpredictable terrain remains a challenge for autonomous legged locomotion, as demonstrated by robots commonly falling in high-profile robotics contests. Telelocomotion can reduce the risk of mission failure by leveraging the high-level understanding of human operators to command in real-time the gaits of legged robots. In this work, a haptic telelocomotion interface was developed. Two within-user studies validate the proof-of-concept interface: (i) The first compared basic interfaces with the haptic interface for control of a simulated hexapedal robot in various levels of traversal complexity; (ii) the second presents a physical implementation and investigated the efficacy of the proposed haptic virtual fixtures. Results are promising to the use of haptic feedback for telelocomotion for complex traversal tasks

Model-Augmented Haptic Telemanipulation: Concept, Retrospective Overview, and Current Use Cases

Certain telerobotic applications, including telerobotics in space, pose particularly demanding challenges to both technology and humans. Traditional bilateral telemanipulation approaches often cannot be used in such applications due to technical and physical limitations such as long and varying delays, packet loss, and limited bandwidth, as well as high reliability, precision, and task duration requirements. In order to close this gap, we research model-augmented haptic telemanipulation (MATM) that uses two kinds of models: a remote model that enables shared autonomous functionality of the teleoperated robot, and a local model that aims to generate assistive augmented haptic feedback for the human operator. Several technological methods that form the backbone of the MATM approach have already been successfully demonstrated in accomplished telerobotic space missions. On this basis, we have applied our approach in more recent research to applications in the fields of orbital robotics, telesurgery, caregiving, and telenavigation. In the course of this work, we have advanced specific aspects of the approach that were of particular importance for each respective application, especially shared autonomy, and haptic augmentation. This overview paper discusses the MATM approach in detail, presents the latest research results of the various technologies encompassed within this approach, provides a retrospective of DLR's telerobotic space missions, demonstrates the broad application potential of MATM based on the aforementioned use cases, and outlines lessons learned and open challenges