Manipulation of a Whole Surgical Tool Within Safe Regions Utilizing Barrier Artificial Potentials

Active constraint enforcement in robotic-assisted surgery is critical for reducing the intra-operative risk of unintentionally damaging sensitive tissues by the surgical instrument. This work considers surgical instruments which can be circumscribed by a geometric capsule and forbidden regions which can be approximated by point clouds in order to produce a repulsive wrench by the control action to guarantee manipulation within safe regions. This work details the control scheme which is based on barrier artificial potentials when considering the whole tool extending our previous results on the tool point. A proof of the control system’s passivity and non constraint violation is provided together with experimental results using a 7-dof KUKA LWR4+ manipulator as a master device in a virtual surgical scene in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

[1]  George A. Rovithakis,et al.  Guaranteed Active Constraints Enforcement on Point Cloud-approximated Regions for Surgical Applications , 2019, 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[2]  Dimitrios Papageorgiou,et al.  On the Stability of Robot Kinesthetic Guidance in the Presence of Active Constraints , 2018, 2018 European Control Conference (ECC).

[3]  Radu Bogdan Rusu,et al.  3D is here: Point Cloud Library (PCL) , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[4]  Jon Louis Bentley,et al.  Multidimensional binary search trees used for associative searching , 1975, CACM.

[5]  Brian L. Davies,et al.  Active Constraints/Virtual Fixtures: A Survey , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[6]  George A. Rovithakis,et al.  Stability of Active Constraints Enforcement in Sensitive Regions Defined by Point-Clouds for Robotic Surgical Procedures , 2019, 2019 18th European Control Conference (ECC).

[7]  Guang-Zhong Yang,et al.  Implicit active constraints for a compliant surgical manipulator , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[8]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for Manipulators and Mobile Robots , 1986 .