Autonomous Execution of Surgical Tasks: the Next Step in Robotic Surgery

Minimally invasive surgery first and, more recently, surgical robotics have brought new perspectives to surgery and have significantly improved the quality of many critical surgical tasks [1,2]. In this paper we go further by describing the design and testing of an architecture to control a robotic platform capable of executing in an autonomous way basic surgical tasks such as US-guided needle insertion and suturing. The results have been obtained during the FP7 European funded project Intelligent Surgical Robotics (I-SUR, grant agreement n. 270396). The main goal of the project was to demonstrate that autonomous surgical robotics can carry out simple surgical tasks effectively and without major intervention by surgeons. To fulfil this goal, we have developed an innovative approach (both in terms of technologies and algorithms) for planning and execution of movement of robot arms in contact with the deformable anatomical environment.