An Open-Source Framework for Surgical Subtask Automation

Robot-Assisted Surgery (RAS) is becoming a standard in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS). Despite RAS’ benefits and potential, surgeons still have to perform themselves a number of monotonous and time-consuming subtasks like knot- tying or blunt dissection. Many believe that the next big step in development is the automation of such subtasks. Partial automation can reduce the cognitive load on surgeons, supporting them to pay more attention to the most critical elements of the surgical workflow. Our aim was to develop a framework to ease and fasten the automation of surgical subtasks. This framework was built alongside the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK), while it can be ported easily onto further robotic platforms, since it is based on the Robot Operating System (ROS). The software includes both stereo vision-based and hierarchical motion planning, with a wide palette of often used surgical gestures—such as grasping, cutting or soft tissue manipulation—as building blocks to support the high-level implementation of autonomous surgical subtasks. This open-source surgical automation framework—irob-saf—is available at https://github.com/ABC-iRobotics/irob-saf.