CPS: Small: Control of Surgical Robots: Network Layer to Tissue Contact

Abstract: This proposed CPS project aims to enable intelligent telesurgery in which a surgeon, or a distributed team of surgeons, can work on tiny regions in the body with minimal access. The University of Washington will expand an existing open surgical robot testbed, and create a robust infrastructure for cyber-physical systems with which to extend traditional real-time control and teleoperation concepts by adding three new interfaces to the system: networking, intelligent robotics, and novel non-linear controllers. Intellectual Merit: This project aims to break new ground beyond teleoperation by adding advanced robotic functions. Equally robust and flexible networking, high-level interfaces, and novel controllers will be added to the existing sytsem. The resulting system will be an open architecture and a substrate upon which many cyber-physical system ideas and algorithms will be tested under realistic conditions. The platforms proven physical robustness will permit rigorous evaluation of results and the open interfaces will encourage collaboration and sharing of results. Broader Impacts: We expect the results to enable new research in multiple ways. First, the collaborators such as Johns Hopkins, U.C. Santa Cruz, and several foreign institutions will be able to remotely connect to new high level interfaces provided by this project. Second, for the first time a robust and completely open surgical telerobot will be available for research so that CPS researchers do not need to be limited to isolated toy problems but instead be able to prototype advanced surgical robotics techniques and evaluate them in realistic contexts including animal procedures.