Towards autonomous control of surgical instruments using adaptive-fusion tracking and robot self-calibration

The ability to track surgical instruments in realtime is crucial for autonomous Robotic Assisted Surgery (RAS). Recently, the fusion of visual and kinematic data has been proposed to track surgical instruments. However, these methods assume that both sensors are equally reliable, and cannot successfully handle cases where there are significant perturbations in one of the sensors' data. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing an enhanced fusion-based method. The main advantage of our method is that it can adjust fusion weights to adapt to sensor perturbations and failures. Another problem is that before performing an autonomous task, these robots have to be repetitively recalibrated by a human for each new patient to estimate the transformations between the different robotic arms. To address this problem, we propose a self-calibration algorithm that empowers the robot to autonomously calibrate the transformations by itself in the beginning of the surgery. We applied our fusion and selfcalibration algorithms for autonomous ultrasound tissue scanning and we showed that the robot achieved stable ultrasound imaging when using our method. Our performance evaluation shows that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-art both in normal and challenging situations