An Autonomous Camera System using the da Vinci Research Kit *

Manual control of the camera arm in telerobotic surgical systems requires the surgeon to repeatedly interrupt the flow of the surgery. This may lead to increased workload and potential errors. This paper provides the implementation details of an autonomous camera system developed using the da Vinci Research Kit with a da Vinci Standard Surgical System. We show that an on-demand autonomous camera system can be integrated with a modern surgical robot. None of the previous autonomous camera research has used a da Vinci robot as a test platform. We show that our hardware implementation closely matches a software simulation of the complete system. Usability testing suggests that this work has the potential to become a useful tool for minimally invasive surgery.