Formal Modeling of a Tele-surgery Domain as a Multi-agent Planning Problem

Technological advancements have led to the development of few commercially available telesurgery systems till date. However such systems are very expensive. In telesurgery, the task of a surgeon (the activities related to a surgery) is partially executed by a robot. Typically, the robot is under the control of a surgeon, it executes the instructions of the controlling surgeon. In this paper we make an attempt to formally model a telesurgery domain (heart surgery) as a multiagent planning problem. The actions related to the surgery are represented as planning operators. The model consists of two interactive agents. The state space of each agent is modeled as a transition system. We have also developed a simple prototype implementation incorporating the above features.