Augmented Reality for 6-DoF Motion Recording, Preview, and Execution to Enable Intuitive Surgical Robot Control

Abstract

In robot-assisted surgeries, the surgeon focuses on the surgical tool and its pose, and not on the complete robot’s shape. However, the joints of redundant robots (robots that have more degrees of freedom (DoF) than needed for the positioning of surgical tools) might move in unexpected/undesired ways. Joint motions that lead to patient or collisions are safety critical. We assume that the medical personnel in the operating room can best decide if a planned robot motions come too close to the patient or not. Therefore, we propose an augmented reality-based solution to interact with the robot during surgery planning, and intervention. The tool can be used to command a robot by drawing a trajectory in augmented reality (AR), visualizing the robot movement to check if it is safe before execution. The proposed solution allows surgeons to plan safe robot motion paths before-hand and adapt them when necessary in situ. As a proof-of-concept, we implemented and demonstrated the proposed solution on a 7-DoF redundant robot by commanding different trajectories. The control architecture to plan and execute motion for a surgical robot using AR is a key result of this work.

Keywords

• ar
• medical robotics
• human robot interaction