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1. Collaborative Robotics Toolkit (CRTK): Open Software Framework for Surgical Robotics Research

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IRC.2020.00014  

   Su, Yun-Hsuan; Munawar, Adnan; Deguet, Anton; Lewis, Andrew; Lindgren, Kyle; Li, Yangming; Taylor, Russell H.; Fischer, Gregory S.; Hannaford, Blake; Kazanzides, Peter (November 2020, 2020 Fourth IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing (IRC))

   null (Ed.)

   Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery has made a substantial impact in operating rooms over the past few decades with their high dexterity, small tool size, and impact on adoption of minimally invasive techniques. In recent years, intelligence and different levels of surgical robot autonomy have emerged thanks to the medical robotics endeavors at numerous academic institutions and leading surgical robot companies. To accelerate interaction within the research community and prevent repeated development, we propose the Collaborative Robotics Toolkit (CRTK), a common API for the RAVEN-II and da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) - two open surgical robot platforms installed at more than 40 institutions worldwide. CRTK has broadened to include other robots and devices, including simulated robotic systems and industrial robots. This common API is a community software infrastructure for research and education in cutting edge human-robot collaborative areas such as semi-autonomous teleoperation and medical robotics. This paper presents the concepts, design details and the integration of CRTK with physical robot systems and simulation platforms. 

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2. Collaborative Robotics Toolkit (CRTK): Open Software Framework for Surgical Robotics Research

   Su, Yun-Hsuan; Munawar, Adnan; Deguet, Anton; Lewis, Andrew; Lindgren, Kyle; Li, Yangming; Taylor, Russell H.; Fischer, Gregory S.; Hannaford, Blake; Kazanzides, Peter (November 2020, IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing (IRC))

   null (Ed.)

   Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery has made a substantial impact in operating rooms over the past few decades with their high dexterity, small tool size, and impact on adoption of minimally invasive techniques. In recent years, intelligence and different levels of surgical robot autonomy have emerged thanks to the medical robotics endeavors at numerous academic institutions and leading surgical robot companies. To accelerate interaction within the research community and prevent repeated development, we propose the Collaborative Robotics Toolkit (CRTK), a common API for the RAVEN-II and da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) - two open surgical robot platforms installed at more than 40 institutions worldwide. CRTK has broadened to include other robots and devices, including simulated robotic systems and industrial robots. This common API is a community software infrastructure for research and education in cutting edge human-robot collaborative areas such as semi-autonomous teleoperation and medical robotics. This paper presents the concepts, design details and the integration of CRTK with physical robot systems and simulation platforms. 

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3. Soft-obstacle Avoidance for Redundant Manipulators with Recurrent Neural Network

   Li, Yangming; Hannaford, Blake (October 2018, IEEE/RSJ International)

   Compressing soft-obstacles secondary to a con- trolled motion task is common for human beings. While these tasks are nearly trivial for teleoperated robots, they remain a challenging problem in robotic autonomy. Addressing the problem is significant. For example, in Minimally Invasive Surgeries (MISs), safely compressing soft tissues ensures the surgical safety and decreases tissue removal, thus dramatically decreases surgical trauma and operating room time, and leads to improved surgical outcomes. In this work, we define the problem of soft-obstacle avoidance and project the safety motion constraints into the task space and the velocity space. We illustrate the significance of addressing this problem in the robotic surgery scenario. We present a Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) based solution, which for- mulates the problem as an inequality constrained optimization problem and solves it in its dual space. The application of the proposed method was demonstrated in the Raven II surgical robot. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method is effective in addressing the soft-obstacle avoidance problem. 

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4. Expanding the Surgical Robotics Community: An Intuitive Sim-to-Real Control Framework for Raven-II with a Budget-Friendly Gamepad Controller

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMR63436.2024.10585789  

   Bui, Mai; Chalfant, Natalie; Sun, Cuiling; Fabrega, Sean; Peng, Haonan; Huang, Kevin; Su, Yun-Hsuan (June 2024, IEEE 2024 International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR))

   This paper proposes a low-cost interface and refined digital twin for the Raven-II surgical robot. Previous simulations of the Raven-II, e.g. via the Asynchronous Multibody Framework (AMBF), presented salient drawbacks, including control inputs inconsistent with Raven-II software, and lack of stable, high-fidelity physical contact simulations. This work bridges both of these gaps, both (1) enabling robust, simulated contact mechanics for dynamic physical interactions with the Raven-II, and (2) developing a universal input format for both simulated and physical platforms. The method furthermore proposes a low cost, commodity game-controller interface for controlling both virtual and real realizations of Raven-II, thus greatly reducing the barrier to access for Raven-II research and collaboration. Overall, this work aims to eliminate the inconsistencies between simulated and real representations of the Raven-II. Such a development can expand the reach of surgical robotics research. Namely, providing end-to-end transparency between the simulated AMBF and physical Raven-II platforms enables a software testbed previously unavailable, e.g. for training real surgeons, for creating digital synthetic datasets, or for prototyping novel architectures like shared control strategies. Experiments validate this transparency by comparing joint trajectories between digital twin and physical testbed given identical inputs. This work may be extended and incorporated into recent efforts in developing modular or common software infrastructures for both simulation and control of real robotic devices, such as the Collaborative Robotics Toolkit (CRTK). 

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5. Context-aware Monitoring in Robotic Surgery

   Yasar, Mohammad Samin; Evans, David; Alemzadeh, Homa (January 2019, International Symposium on Medical Robotics)

   Robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has enabled procedures with increased precision and dexterity, but surgical robots are still open loop and require surgeons to work with a tele-operation console providing only limited visual feedback. In this setting, mechanical failures, software faults, or human errors might lead to adverse events resulting in patient complications or fatalities. We argue that impending adverse events could be detected and mitigated by applying context-specific safety constraints on the motions of the robot. We present a context-aware safety monitoring system which segments a surgical task into subtasks using kinematics data and monitors safety constraints specific to each subtask. To test our hypothesis about context specificity of safety constraints, we analyze recorded demonstrations of dry-lab surgical tasks collected from the JIGSAWS database as well as from experiments we conducted on a Raven II surgical robot. Analysis of the trajectory data shows that each subtask of a given surgical procedure has consistent safety constraints across multiple demonstrations by different subjects. Our preliminary results show that violations of these safety constraints lead to unsafe events, and there is often sufficient time between the constraint violation and the safety-critical event to allow for a corrective action. 

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