Abstract
Autonomous positioning of surgical robotic forceps is very promising toward high-level assistant function such as automated task. It is the first step toward autonomous surgical systems that can make full use of the robotic system. To achieve high accuracy in positioning, visual servoing technique is utilized in many applications. However, in visual servoing, we cannot control the trajectory of motion in Cartesian space. Undesired behavior of forceps in Cartesian space may make damage to tissue or blood vessels. To cope with the problem, we propose a vision-guided positioning system with z-separated visual servoing. The interaction matrix is decomposed into positioning and approaching components. Approaching velocity is computed on the basis of difference of disparity, and positioning velocity is yielded by reformulated interaction matrix. The experimental results showed that the proposed method can control the trajectory in Cartesian space by adjusting approaching parameter. Furthermore, the needle gripping task is successfully performed. We expect that this method would be used for autonomous surgical system.
