Preliminary protocol for interoperable telesurgery

In the same way Internet standards have connected heterogeneous computing systems, we predict robot communication standards will speed research and development of teleoperated robots. In this paper, a preliminary specification is presented for interoperability among robotic telesurgery systems. This is a first step towards developing a full telerobotics protocol. One way that interoperability will help is by allowing new teleoperation robots to be compared to existing ones on standard platforms. Using our preliminary specification, two telesurgical masters located in Yokohama, Japan controlled the same surgical assistant robot located in Seattle, WA, USA. Teleoperation was over the public Internet and users performance was measured on a standardized task. The value of the communication standard becomes clear, as a comparison between the two systems exposes several important improvements for the surgical master systems.