Luzie Schreiter

ROS-Based Cognitive Surgical Robotics

The case study at hand describes our ROS-based setup for robot-assisted (minimally-invasive) surgery. The system includes different perception components (Kinects, Time-of-Flight Cameras, Endoscopic Cameras, Marker-based Trackers, Ultrasound), input devices (Force Dimension Haptic Input Devices), robots (KUKA LWRs, Universal Robots UR5, ViKY Endoscope Holder), surgical instruments and augmented reality displays. Apart from bringing together the individual components in a modular and flexible setup, many subsystems have been developed based on combinations of the single components. These subsystems include a bimanual telemanipulator, multiple Kinect people tracking, knowledge-based endoscope guidance and ultrasound tomography. The platform is not a research project in itself, but a basic infrastructure used for various research projects. We want to show how to build a large robotics platform, in fact a complete lab setup, based on ROS. It is flexible and modular enough to do research on different robotics related questions concurrently. The whole setup is running on ROS Indigo and Ubuntu Trusty (14.04). A repository of already open sourced components is available at https://github.com/KITmedical.

Application of contract-based verification techniques for hybrid automata to surgical robotic systems

Surgical robotic systems have to deliver a high quality of safety, since they deal with human lives. Their safety specifications must ensure the absence of risks for the patient and the operating room staff. To respect the modular nature of a surgical system, we propose a contract based verification approach for safety. We introduce a case study based on a typical surgical robotic operation scenario and model its components by using hybrid automata. We exploit the theory of parallel composition of contracts to verify properties on each component and prove that the property of the overall system can be obtained by composition.

Hierarchical Task Networks as Domain-Specific Language for Planning Surgical Interventions

The following paper addresses the challenges of defining surgical workflows. Surgical workflows have to deal with medical and technical aspects on different levels of abstraction in order to ensure safety. We propose hierarchical task networks (HTN) as a unifying domain-specific language (DSL) for the definition of surgical workflows. The DSL describes relations and dependencies in state sequences and surgical actions for complex workflows on varying levels of detail. With an HTN planner we are able to decompose high-level steps into primitive actions and identify all possible workflows together with their paths through the intervention. This information can be used to identify missing or inaccurate information in literature and consequently improve the workflow and safety of the surgical intervention. By means of a case study we present a detailed HTN-based DSL for Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy to show the advantage of using our particular approach to workflow modeling.

3D Perception Technologies for Surgical Operating Theatres.

3D Perception technologies have been explored in various fields. This paper explores the application of such technologies for surgical operating theatres. Clinical applications can be found in workflow detection, tracking and analysis, collision avoidance with medical robots, perception of interaction between participants of the operation, training of the operation room crew, patient calibration and many more. In this paper a complete perception solution for the operating room is shown. The system is based on the ToF technology integrated to the Microsoft Kinect One implements a multi camera approach. Special emphasize is put on the tracking of the personnel and the evaluation of the system performance and accuracy.