Autonomous Flexible Endoscope for Minimally Invasive Surgery With Enhanced Safety

Automation in robotic surgery has become an increasingly attractive topic. Although full automation remains fictional, task autonomy and conditional autonomy are highly achievable. Apart from the performance of task fulfillment, one major concern in robotic surgery is safety. In this paper, we present a flexible endoscope that can help to guide the minimally invasive surgical operations automatically. It is developed based on the tendon-driven continuum mechanism and is integrated with the da Vinci research kit. In total, the proposed flexible endoscope has six degree-of-freedoms. Visual servoing is adopted to automatically track the surgical instruments. During the tracking, optimal control method is used to minimize the motion and space occupation of the flexible endoscope, which will improve the safety of both the robot system and the assistants nearby. Compared with the existing rigid endoscope, both the experimental results and the user study results show that the proposed flexible endoscope has advantages of being safer and less space occupation without reducing its comfort level.