Semi-Autonomous Surgical Robot Control for Beating-Heart Surgery

In this paper, a semi-autonomous robot control system is developed for 3D robotic tracking of the complex physiological organ motion introduced by respiration and heartbeat in cardiac surgery. The same control system enables the surgeon’s hand to perceive the non-oscillatory portion of the surgical robot-heart tissue interaction force. The semi-autonomous surgical system includes a slave surgical robot which can compensate for the physiological organ motion automatically and a master robot (user interface) which is manipulated by the surgeon to provide task commands to the surgical robot. The proposed impedance control method for the surgical robot only needs the frequency range of the physiological motion to synchronize the surgical instrument with the organ motion automatically. Another reference impedance model for the master robot is designed to provide non-oscillatory force feedback to the surgeon. A usability study emulating the motion requirements of tissue ablation is carried out. Experimental results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing the results to the manual compensation method.