Semi-Autonomous Laparoscopic Robotic Electro-surgery with a Novel 3D Endoscope.

This paper reports a robotic laparoscopic surgery system performing electro-surgery on porcine cadaver kidney, and evaluates its accuracy in an open loop control scheme to conduct targeting and cutting tasks guided by a novel 3D endoscope. We describe the design and integration of the novel laparoscopic imaging system that is capable of reconstructing the surgical field using structured light. A targeting task is first performed to determine the average positioning error of the system as guided by the laparoscopic camera. The imaging system is then used to reconstruct the surface of a porcine cadaver kidney, and generate a cutting trajectory with consistent depth. The paper concludes by using the robotic system in open loop control to cut this trajectory using a multi degree of freedom electro-surgical tool. It is demonstrated that for a cutting depth of 3 mm, the robotic surgical system follows the trajectory with an average depth of 2.44 mm and standard deviation of 0.34 mm. The average positional accuracy of the system was 2.74±0.99 mm.

A Confidence-Based Shared Control Strategy for the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR).

Autonomous robotic assisted surgery (RAS) systems aim to reduce human errors and improve patient outcomes leveraging robotic accuracy and repeatability during surgical procedures. However, full automation of RAS in complex surgical environments is still not feasible and collaboration with the surgeon is required for safe and effective use. In this work, we utilize our Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) to develop and evaluate a shared control strategy for the collaboration of the robot with a human operator in surgical scenarios. We consider 2D pattern cutting tasks with partial blood occlusion of the cutting pattern using a robotic electrocautery tool. For this surgical task and RAS system, we i) develop a confidence-based shared control strategy, ii) assess the pattern tracking performances of manual and autonomous controls and identify the confidence models for human and robot as well as a confidence-based control allocation function, and iii) experimentally evaluate the accuracy of our proposed shared control strategy. In our experiments on porcine fat samples, by combining the best elements of autonomous robot controller with complementary skills of a human operator, our proposed control strategy improved the cutting accuracy by 6.4%, while reducing the operator work time to 44 % compared to a pure manual control.