Robot-assisted occlusion avoidance for surgical instrument optical tracking system

Due to the direct line-of-sight constraint, surgical instrument optical tracking system (OTS) suffers occlusion problem caused by the equipments, staff members, or surgical instruments during the operation. To alleviate the burden of surgeons, we propose a robotic platform and an optimization based control methods to autonomously re-configure the optical tracker when the occlusion problem is about to occur. The robotic platform, which comprises a robot arm with 4 degrees of freedom, an optical tracker, and a RGB-D camera, is first proposed and characterized. The problem formulation and algorithm development are then intensively analysed. Furthermore, simulation experiments with different occlusion situations are conducted. The results are analyzed and discussed in the end.