Development of a novel hand-eye calibration for intuitive control of minimally invasive surgical robot

Robotic-assisted surgical system has introduced a powerful platform through dexterous instrument and hand-eye coordination intuitive control. The knowledge of laparoscopic vision is a crucial piece of information for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery focusing on improved surgical outcomes. Obtaining the transformation with respect to the laparoscope and robot slave arm frames using hand-eye calibration is essential, which is a key component for developing intuitive control algorithm. We proposed a novel two-step modified dual quaternion for hand-eye calibration in this study. The dual quaternion was exploited to solve the hand-eye calibration simultaneously and powered by an iteratively separate solution. The obtained hand-eye calibration result was applied to the intuitive control by using the hand-eye coordination criterion. Promising simulations and experimental studies were conducted to evaluate the proposed method on our surgical robot system. We extensively compared the proposed method with state-of-the-art methods. Results demonstrate this method can improve the calibration accuracy. The effectiveness of the intuitive control algorithm was quantitatively evaluated, and an improved hand-eye calibration method was developed. The relationship between laparoscope and robot kinematics can be established for intuitive control.