Virtual Fixture Assistance for Suturing in Robot-Aided Pediatric Endoscopic Surgery

Abstract

The limited workspace in pediatric endoscopic surgery makes surgical suturing one of the most difficult tasks. During suturing, surgeons have to prevent collisions between tools and also collisions with the surrounding tissues. Surgical robots have been shown to be effective in adult laparoscopy, but assistance for suturing in constrained workspaces has not been yet fully explored. In this letter, we propose guidance virtual fixtures to enhance the performance and the safety of suturing while generating the required task constraints using constrained optimization and Cartesian force feedback. We propose two guidance methods: looping virtual fixtures and a trajectory guidance cylinder, that are based on dynamic geometric elements. In simulations and experiments with a physical robot, we show that the proposed methods achieve a more precise and safer looping in robot-assisted pediatric endoscopy.

arXiv commentAccepted on RA-L/ICRA 2020, 8 Pages. Fixed a few typos

References in corpus (2)

• Dynamic Active Constraints for Surgical Robots using Vector Field Inequalities
• A Unified Framework for the Teleoperation of Surgical Robots in Constrained Workspaces

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Autonomous Coordinated Control of the Light Guide for Positioning in Vitreoretinal Surgery
• Touching the tumor boundary: A pilot study on ultrasound based virtual fixtures for breast-conserving surgery
• Neural Minimum-Distance Estimation for Collision-Aware Operation of Multi-Arm Laparoscopy Surgical Robots Through Learning-from-Simulation