A Cognitive Robot Control Architecture for Autonomous Execution of Surgical Tasks

Abstract

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)

A First Evaluation of a Multi-Modal Learning System to Control Surgical Assistant Robots via Action Segmentation

“…Specifically, previous applications of Model Predictive Controllers (MPCs) can be found to improve visual servoing control of underactuated devices within the confined environment of the human anatomy [12], [13], [14]. For the advancement of autonomous controls in this scenario, most of the literature presents case study applications of classic control [15], [16], [17], with only the work presented in [18] formulating a control strategy in line with the goal of this work. However, to the best of our knowledge, this work and its predecessor [8] represent the first attempts at direct cooperation between a surgeon and an autonomous laparoscopy 1 SARAS is an EU founded project and stands for Smart Autonomous Robotic Assistant Surgeon, details at www.saras-project.eu manipulator using high-level cognition with improved safety control strategies.…”

The Raven Open Surgical Robotic Platforms: A Review and Prospect

“…As teleoperation is still the dominant way to control surgical robots, there are many Raven citations in this topic [8,12,24,26,34,38,39,44,63,64,66,[68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78]. Whilemuch research focuses on the classical teleoperation problems, such as the system architecture, the master controller and the communication problems, etc., we do see some new research problems attracting attention.…”

Raven: Open Surgical Robotic Platforms

“…As teleoperation is still the dominant way to control surgical robots, there are many Raven citations in this topic [8,12,24,26,34,38,39,46,65,66,68,[70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80]. Whilemuch research focuses on the classical teleoperation problems, such as the system architecture, the master controller and the communication problems, etc., we do see some new research problems attracting attention.…”