Development of a cognitive engine for balancing automation and human control of surgical robotic system

This paper presents the architecture and work flow of an intelligent surgical robotic system that we are developing. The robotic surgical system which comprises a cognitive engine is designed to augment and enhance the hand-eye coordination capability of the surgeon during operation in order to achieve the desired outcome and reduce invasiveness. By incorporating advances in surgical simulation and robot-assisted surgery, patient specific surgical plans can be derived with robot manipulation included. Adaptive visual and haptic cues based are generated based on the complex surgical plan to enhance human control of the robot. We illustrate our approach with an example task analogous to the laparoscopie abdominal surgery, and analyze the user´s performance on teleoperation and cooperative control for the example task.