Preoperative planning for the multi-arm surgical robot using PSO-GP-based performance optimization

For the robotically-assisted minimally invasive surgery, preoperative planning is essential towards assisting surgeons to prepare the intervention and to decide the best access to the surgical site. Many recent studies in preoperative planning have focused on the pose selection of the robot and the port placement. However, as such techniques cannot evaluate the performance of the multi-arm cooperation, their applications are constrained in real practise with multi-arm surgical robots. In this paper, the surgical workspace is divided and the subspaces are assigned with different weights to reflect the internal differences within the surgical workspace. We propose three metrics to evaluate the performance of the multi-arm surgical robot: Global Isotropy Index (GII) to measure the dexterity of one single robot arm; Cooperation Capability Index (CCI) to reflect the performance of the multi-arm cooperation; Minimum Distance Index (MDI) to describe the collision avoidance of the robotic arms. We also propose a combination of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Gaussian Process (GP) to locate the port placement and robot positioning. The proposed integrated PSO-GP-based optimization strategy is implemented on a three-arm surgical robot. Two sets of experiments are carried out to validate our method. The results demonstrate that the performance optimization strategy based on PSO-GP is capable of guiding surgeons to plan an intervention with the multi-arm surgical robot.

[1]  Fan Zhang,et al.  An under-actuated manipulation controller based on Workspace Analysis and Gaussian Processes , 2015, 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

[2]  Septimiu E. Salcudean,et al.  Fast constrained global minimax optimization of robot parameters , 1998, Robotica.

[3]  Clément Gosselin,et al.  A Global Performance Index for the Kinematic Optimization of Robotic Manipulators , 1991 .

[4]  Rainer Konietschke,et al.  A Preoperative Planning Procedure for Robotically Assisted Minimally Invasive Interventions , 2004 .

[5]  Russell C. Eberhart,et al.  A new optimizer using particle swarm theory , 1995, MHS'95. Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Micro Machine and Human Science.

[6]  Lakmal D. Seneviratne,et al.  Collision Avoidance in Multiple-Redundant Manipulators , 1997, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[7]  J. Bruce C. Davies,et al.  Continuum robots - a state of the art , 1999, Proceedings 1999 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.99CH36288C).

[8]  Robert D. Howe,et al.  Port placement planning in robot-assisted coronary artery bypass , 2003, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[9]  J. Reinbolt,et al.  Endoscopic coronary artery bypass graft (ECABG) procedure with robotic assistance. , 1999, The heart surgery forum.

[10]  Rajnikant V. Patel,et al.  Port Placement for Endoscopic Cardiac Surgery Based on Robot Dexterity Optimization , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[11]  Naoki Suzuki,et al.  Robotic surgery setup simulation with the integration of inverse-kinematics computation and medical imaging , 2006, Comput. Methods Programs Biomed..

[12]  Zhijiang Du,et al.  Kinematics Modeling of a Notched Continuum Manipulator , 2015 .

[13]  Olivier Lambercy,et al.  Motion planning for a multi-arm surgical robot using both sampling-based algorithms and motion primitives , 2015, 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).