A study on autonomous suturing task assignment in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery.

BACKGROUND

Sutures are a set of standard actions which are accomplished by multi-instruments, researchers studied the robot autonomy of suturing, which was based on movement planning completed by a single instrument, but did not consider the assignment of suturing tasks to instruments.

METHOD: A method was proposed for the autonomous suturing task assignment to instruments, which built a comprehensive evaluation index under some constraint conditions to determine the optimal scheme of the suturing task assignment to instruments.

RESULTS

An experiment of duodenal ulcer repair with a suturing operation was conducted under the guidance of a surgeon, and the results showed that the optimal scheme of the suturing task assignment was obtained by using the proposed method.

CONCLUSIONS

The proposed method can be used for autonomous suturing task assignment, which is beneficial for improving the intelligence of robot operation.