Vision-Based Framework of Single Master Dual Slave Semi-Autonomous Surgical Robot System

Background: In the traditional Robot assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) scenario, the instruments are fully controlled by the surgeon through tele-operation. Recent works have widely explored the surgical intelligence by integrating advanced approaches to enhance the surgical operating room (OR) outcomes. Methods: We propose a novel single-master dual-slave framework for semi-autonomous suturing task, laparoscope information is introduced to feed back into the robotic control loop to guide the movement of surgical instrument. Results: Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can handle the single-master dual-slave semi-autonomous suturing subtask. Furthermore, the framework exhibits compelling performance leading to the efficiency of surgical OR. Conclusions: Adding vision information into the robotic control loop can achieve the semi-autonomous operation, improve the surgical OR efficiency, this capability yields new level of intelligence for the RMIS.