Development of a hand-eye registration method for the Da Vinci Research Kit

Basic description of the topic:

The rapid spread of Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RAMIS) induced a revolution to the surgical practice; a number of interventions can be performed using teleoperated manipulators through small incisions.  The new technique presented new difficulties to the surgeons; some subtasks of the operation became monotonous and time-consuming. Many believe that the next step in the development of surgery will be subtask-level automation. One of the current challenges of surgical subtask automation is to achieve sub-millimeter accuracy using the image guided manipulators.

The task is to overview the literature of hand-eye registration in the field of surgical subtask automation, and to implement a hand-eye registration application based on the found techniques.  The research-enhanced da Vinci Surgical System, da Vinci Research Kit (DVRK) available in the Antal Bejczy Center for Intelligent Robotics. The work is also supported by the Robot Operating Sytem (ROS) based modular iRob Surgical Automation Framework (irob-saf). The task includes systematic measurement and analysis of the accuracy achieved by the developed application.

Detailed tasks:

  • Literature overview in the field of surgical subtask automation and hand-eye registration;
  • Get acquainted with ROS, the da Vinci Surgical System, the DVRK platform and irob-saf;
  • Development of an effective hand-eye registration methodology for partial automation in surgery;
  • Integrating the hand-eye registration application with the robot, the DVRK research platform and irob-saf;
  • Execution and evaluation of the achieved accuracy.

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