Autonomy is the next frontier of research in robotic surgery and its aim is to improve the quality of surgical procedures in the next future.

One fundamental requirement for autonomy is advanced perception capability through vision sensors.

In this article, we propose a novel calibration technique for a surgical scenario with a da Vinci® Research Kit (dVRK) robot. Camera and robotic arms calibration are necessary to precise position and emulate expert surgeons. The novel calibration technique is tailored for RGB-D cameras.

Different tests performed on relevant use cases prove that we significantly improve precision and accuracy with respect to the state of the art solutions for similar devices on a surgical-size setup. Moreover, our calibration method can be easily extended to the standard surgical endoscope used in the real surgical scenarios.

OUR METHOD

The aim of the calibration procedure is twofold. First, we perform the computation of the rigid transformations Tw⋆ between the common reference frame (world ) and the base frame of the arms, ⋆∈{ecmb,psm1b,psm2b}.

Second, we estimate the transformation Tcamecm between the camera reference frame and the ECM reference frame. The resulting transformation tree is shown in Figure. 

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