Magnetically anchored pan-tilt stereoscopic robot with optical-inertial stabilization for minimally invasive surgery

We present our latest work on designing a magnetically anchored wireless stereoscopic robot with 2 degrees of freedom (DOF) Pan-Tilt unit for single-port minimally invasive surgery (MIS). This camera could reduce the tool clashing issue in MIS and could provide better angulation and visualization of surgical field. After introduction of the robot through umbilicus (belly button), it is anchored to internal abdominal wall using a magnet from outside. Surgeon can change view angle of the camera remotely via a wireless joystick and a real-time stereo view will be displayed on a user interface screen. Since the robot is anchored using an external magnet on the abdominal wall during the surgical operation, surplus shocks and slight tremble of the robot will result in poor visualization. Therefore, we developed a real-time video stabilization scheme to eliminate these affects. Our proposed method uses a high frequency inertial measurement sensory data fused with visual optical flow vectors, extracted from the stereo camera, to estimate the unwanted shocks during the video streaming. This method compensates and stabilizes video streams in real-time by shifting the video images in the opposite direction of the estimated motion vector. We conducted several experiments including robot control, video streaming performance, and real-time video stabilization to investigate the system function. The results of these experiments are reported in this paper.