Acquisition and processing of human motion patterns on the Da Vinci Research Kit

Basic description of the topic:

Interventions of Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RAMIS) are performed through small incisions, while the area of operation is viewed on endoscopic camera stream. The appearance of teleoperated robotic systems in the operating room made possible to record the movement of the surgeons’ hands, supporting surgical data science. The gathered data can be utilized in a number of research areas, such as surgical skill assessment or surgical subtask automation.

 

The task is to plan and execute a trial in phantom environment on the research-enhanced da Vinci Surgical System, da Vinci Research Kit (DVRK) available in the Antal Bejczy Center for Intelligent Robotics, and to acquisitive human motion data.  The low level control of the robot is supported by the modular iRob Surgical Automation Framework (irob-saf).  The task includes the processing of the motion data, extracting features and segmenting elements of the workflow.

Detailed tasks:

  • Literature overview in the field of RAMIS and the analysis of surgical motion patterns;
  • Get acquainted with ROS, the da Vinci Surgical System, the DVRK platform and irob-saf;
  • Design of an experiment and the required phantom environment, preparation of the system to the acquisition of motion data.
  • Execution of the experiments, recording of human motion data;
  • Processing of the gathered data using methodologies found in the literature, information extraction.

Over the course of the project, the student will get involved with the various research project of the Antal Bejczy Center for Intelligent Robotics.