A two-layer approach for shared control in semi-autonomous robotic surgery

In autonomous robotic surgery, the supervision of the surgeon cannot be avoided due to the unforeseenable emergencies and complications that can take place during an operation. When necessary, the surgeon has to take over the surgical system switching it from an autonomous mode to a teleoperation mode. In this paper we propose a two-layer bilateral control architecture that ensures a safe behavior during the switch and high performance during the teleoperation. Experiments are proposed for validating the architecture proposed in the paper.