Dual-Arm Needle Manipulation with the da Vinci® Surgical Robot Under Uncertainty

Abstract

This paper proposes a path correction method for surgical robotic systems performing needle handoff manipulations as part of autonomous execution of surgical suturing. During handoff motions, the position and orientation of the needle is subject to perturbations from the idealized planned pose due to uncertainties in camera-robot calibration and needle localization. If, after a perturbation, the system needs to perform subsequent needle regrasp(s), but the robot still follows the originally planned trajectory out of the path planner [1], it has a lower chance of gripping the needle properly. In order to accommodate these unpredictable needle pose perturbations, the proposed path correction method works locally to direct the needle from the wrong pose to the original pose by partial replanning of the robot motion. The reliability of the proposed method is evaluated with three sets of experiments in a simulation environment.