Positioning tele-operated surgical robots for collision-free optimal operation

Positioning a surgical robot in a typically cluttered operating room for optimal operation is a challenging task. Surgical tele-operated manipulators are designed to have a flexible structure to adapt to the operating environment, and thus have a high number of degrees of freedom to position. They are also usually subject to additional spatial constraints such as having a fixed point during the intervention, which is typically the case in mini-invasive interventions. Moreover, the planned results should not only guarantee a collision free operation, but should also target a maximum separation from the surrounding obstacles, since this is a critical application, and since the positioning is done in an error prone environment. In this paper we propose a systematic method for the positioning of the passive dofs of a robotic system; i.e., those that are not under direct tele-operation or autonomous control. Optimality is translated by the separation between the different manipulators, as well as with the surrounding obstacles. These requirements am formulated as an optimization problem, and an interference measurement method is presented to allow for an efficient solution. Results on the daVinci™ system am presented to illustrate the proposed approach