Combined collision avoidance and prevention of soft tissue damage control method for surgical robots

Surgical robots will have a more and more important role in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), especially in laparoscopic procedures. They can overcome some of the problems of laparoscopic surgery and improve surgeon´s performance. However, they also introduce new challenges and problems. Perhaps the biggest problem is lack of feedback to surgeons. This lack of feedback can cause serious problems such as tissue damage, or touching vulnerable organs. To avoid such situations, prevention of tissue damage or collision avoidance methods have been proposed. There is however a lack of methods that combine them in a simple control algorithm. In this paper we propose a novel control method for MIS master-slave surgical robot that combines collision avoidance and prevention of tissue damage. We have validated our method with a real robot in in-vitro experiments. Experimental results suggest that our method improves surgeon´s performance and safety.