Active Sensorimotor Augmentation in Robotics-Assisted Surgical Systems

Abstract

This chapter discusses the concepts of active sensory augmentation and active motor augmentation for robotic surgery. Surgical robots can provide surgeons with supplementary, real-time perceptual information about a surgical procedure to indirectly enhance the quality of surgery. In general, the goal of sensory augmentation is to provide superior awareness of interaction with tissue during surgery. In addition to the examples mentioned above, force-enabled virtual guidance and haptics-based, forbidden-region virtual fixtures have been used in the literature to provide guidance and avoidance, respectively, based on patient-specific anatomy and surgical trajectories, during robotics-assisted surgeries. To deal with this issue, adaptive filters have been proposed in the literature. The sensory restriction can be addressed using sensorized robotics-assisted surgical systems. The mechanism measures force applied by the surgeon as an indication of the intended motion profile. As a result, the robot can detect the surgeon’s intention and can react to the intended motions by providing corrective forces to enhance the surgical outcomes.