Integration of a redundant and collaborative robot in a teleoperated fetal surgical platform

Abstract

Robotic Minimally Invasive Surgery is one of the surgical fields in which robotics is most extended. Minimally Invasive Surgery is used in fetal surgery for the correction of TTTS, among others pathologies. This technique has great complexity and long learning curves. To improve this surgery a robot-assisted TTTS surgery-oriented teleoperation platform was developed by the robotic division of the CREB-UPC. This work integrates in this teleoperation system a set of improvements at a high-level control oriented to improve dexterity, safety and agility of the setup. This improvements are all implemented using a hierarchical based multi-task control. The control improvements are based on redundant and collaborative robots. This work studies the way to exploit the robot kinematic redundancy to increase the dexterity and reachability of the current teleoperation platform and optimize its space occupancy. Moreover, this work also studies collaborative strategies in the surgical workspace, to increase safety in human-robot interactions and optimize the platform preoperative set-up. The outcomes of this work will be integrated in the actual robotic teleoperated platform by replacing the current slave robot for a redundant and collaborative robot