An Orbital Velocity-Based Obstacle Avoidance Algorithm for Surgical Robots

This paper introduces an obstacle avoidance methodology of autonomous assistant robot for surgery. Currently employed master-slave surgical robots just copy movements that a surgeon creates. This kind of behavior causes unexpected collision on a vulnerable surface of an organ and makes possibility of danger which causes serious injury. Many of diagnostic technology with navigation systems are used to make up for these disadvantages and an obstacle avoidance algorithm in this research also contribute to raise safety of surgery. We present 4 states of two instruments in terms of shortest distance as a measure of collision. Then, the autonomous motion of a robotic instrument is generated by a motion planning algorithm which incorporates an orbital velocity component into attractive potential function. As a result, the robotic instrument exhibits a natural maneuver movement around obstacles. A hardware-in the-loop approach is employed to control the motion of the two instruments and the effectiveness of the proposed motion planning algorithm was verified through several simulation examples.