A supervisory controller for semi-autonomous surgical interventions

Nowadays the main research interests in the field of Robotic Minimally InvasiveSurgery (R-MIS) are related to robots’ autonomy. Techniques like trajectory planning, collision avoidance, decision making and scene understanding require technical advances in order to be applied to such an environment. In this paper, we propose a deterministic supervisory controller for a surgical semi-autonomous robotic platform. The proposed method uses a three-level Hierarchical Finite State Machine (HFSM) to define all the possible behaviours of the autonomous system. The transitions of the HFSM are triggered by the Observers, a set of functions fed with the state of the system (robot kinematics, anatomical structures, etc.) that output a logical description of the surgery state. We tested the supervisory controller performing the “bladder neck incision” phase of a Radical Prostatectomy (RARP) procedure.