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.

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This paper works toward the development and implementation of a INS/GPS integration system for the land vehicle application. A developed INS system is introduced to keep measuring the position/orientation of the vehicle when the vehicle is passed through GPS signal shading area. A new orientation scheme is studied to full fill the measurement states of the integration system. Roll/pitch estimation compensating external acceleration is performed with inertial sensors and yaw angle is obtained with GPS information. And then, the orientation information is supplied to the linearized Kalman filter of error model. This process is shown to improve the performance of the integration system. The field test was performed along a non-flat contour with some dismissals of GPS on it.

This paper introduces a robot visual-inertial tracking algorithm for a robot manipulator intended to track an object using inertial sensors incorporated into the object. To create this algorithm, the inertial Jacobian is first newly defined in order to show the relationship between an angle set velocity vector of the object and the angular velocity vector of the robot tip. Then, the inertial Jacobian is combined with the conventional image Jacobian. Therefore, the proposed algorithm requires only two landmarks with the help of an inertial measurement unit to track a moving object with six degrees of freedom, while at least three landmarks are required in the conventional stereo visual servoing algorithm. Further, the possession of a multi-rate controller allows the integration system to out-perform conventional systems in the tracking of an object's attitude change. A suggested application of the proposed method is tracking and selection of a container from a shipping vessel that is being affected by large waves. Simulations and experiments were conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposed methodology.

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