Abstract-Suturing is an important yet time-consuming part of surgery. A fast and robust autonomous procedure could reduce surgeon fatigue, and shorten operation times. It could also be of particular importance for suturing in remote telesurgery settings where latency can complicate the master-slave mode control that is the current practice for robotic surgery with systems like the da Vinci R . We study the applicability of the trajectory transfer algorithm proposed in [12] to the automation of suturing. The core idea of this procedure is to first use non-rigid registration to find a 3D warping function which maps the demonstration scene onto the test scene, then use this warping function to transform the robot end-effector trajectory. Finally a robot joint trajectory is generated by solving a trajectory optimization problem that attempts to find the closest feasible trajectory, accounting for external constraints, such as joint limits and obstacles. Our experiments investigate generalization from a single demonstration to differing initial conditions. A first set of experiments considers the problem of having a simulated Raven II system [5] suture two flaps of tissue together. A second set of experiments considers a PR2 robot performing sutures in a scaled-up experimental setup. The simulation experiments were fully autonomous. For the real-world experiments we provided human input to assist with the detection of landmarks to be fed into the registration algorithm. The success rate for learning from a single demonstration is high for moderate perturbations from the demonstration's initial conditions, and it gradually decreases for larger perturbations.
For example, Schulman et al. REF use a trajectory transfer algorithm to transform human demonstrations into model trajectories.
A case study of trajectory transfer through non-rigid registration for a simplified suturing scenario
2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
Computer Science