Dual-Arm Needle Manipulation with the da Vinci®Surgical Robot
Su Lu, Thomas E. Shkurti, Murat Cenk Çavuşoğlu · 2020
This paper presents a method of planning and performing dual-arm needle grasp and regrasp manipulations using the da Vinci®Robotic Surgical System. This method implements a hybrid-object-based state-space Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm to manage needle regrasps. Previous methods have attempted to pick up a loose surgical needle in the environment and then use the same grasp to begin suturing; however, the initial needle grasp is not always ideal in terms of the needle pose with respect to the gripper or the workspace of the arm. Thus, it is advantageous to regrasp the needle in a more optimal manner before suturing proper begins. To solve the problem, a hybrid-object state space (HySS) planner is implemented under the RRT - Connect motion planning framework. This planner is able to find a collision-free handoff manipulation path connected by a series of intermediate hybrid states. We show that this algorithm produces trajectories which can be successfully executed by a simulated da Vinci®robot and result in grasps that are optimal as defined by [1].