Improving Cartesian position Accuraca of a telesurgical robot

This paper evaluates and improves the capability of the endoscopic surgical robot AESOP (ComputerMotion Inc., Goleta, CA, USA) to carry out tasks autonomously. First, the Cartesian position accuracy of the robot is measured using an optical tracking system. Since the obtained results are not satisfactory, the tracking system is then used to correct the position of the robot. Two approaches are presented: in the first one, the relation between the tracking and the robot reference frames is determined and is kept constant during the execution of a task, while in the second one, some parameters involved in this relation are updated at each sampled time of the system by means of a Kalman filter. The algorithms have been implemented in the real tracking-robot system and numerical results are reported in this paper, showing that the proposed solutions clearly improve the autonomous performance of the original system.