The SARAS concept is to develop a comprehensive solo surgery system by integrating two additional assistive robotic arms and a cooperative and cognitive AI core with a surgical robotic system in order to reduce the number of surgeons in the operating room.
THE CONCEPT:
The concept requires the development of the following new technologies to make the project fully implemented and operational:
Perception & Decisional Autonomy
The Perception module takes care of understanding the complexity of the surgical area, by reconstructing, labelling and tracking all its elements as observed by the available sensors.
Cognitive Control
The Cognitive module learns from real intervention data the structure of complex laparoscopic procedures to identify anomalies, understand the surgeon’s actions (situation awareness), and his/her future needs (decision making).
Advanced Planning & Navigation
The Planning module translates the autonomous decisions made by the Cognitive module into appropriate trajectories for the laparoscopic tools mounted on SARAS assistive robotic arms.
Human-Robot Interaction
The Human–Robot Interface gives the surgeon full control over the procedure through a multi-modal interface with novel capabilities.
THE APPROACH:
SARAS will develop a robotic system with three levels of increasing complexity:
MULTIROBOTS-SURGERY platform
The main surgeon will use a commercial robotic system whereas the assistant surgeon will teleoperate the SARAS assistive robotic arms.
SOLO-SURGERY platform
The SARAS system will be autonomous and will play the role of the assistant to help the main surgeon at the da Vinci console performing the surgical procedure. The daVinci console of the main surgeon will be enhanced by integrating force/tactile feedback and a speech recognition module to interact with the SARAS system.
LAPARO2.0-SURGERY platform
SARAS system will play the role of the assistant as in the SOLO-SURGERY case, but with the main surgeon using standard handheld laparoscopic tools.
Read the The ambition of SARAS’ Project.