The RAVEN: Design and validation of a telesurgery system

The collaborative effort between fundamental science, engineering and medicine provides physicians with improved tools and techniques for delivering effective health care. Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) techniques have revolutionized the way a number of surgical procedures are performed. Recent advances in surgical robotics are once again revolutionizing MIS interventions and open surgery. In an earlier research endeavor, 30 surgeons performed 7 different MIS tasks using the Blue Dragon system to collect measurements of position, force, and torque on a porcine model. This data served as the foundation for a kinematic optimization of a spherical surgical robotic manipulator. Following the optimization, a seven-degree-of-freedom cable-actuated surgical manipulator was designed and integrated, providing all degrees of freedom present in manual MIS as well as wrist joints located at the surgical end-effector. The RAVEN surgical robot system has the ability to teleoperate utilizing a single bi-directional UDP socket via a remote master device. Preliminary telesurgery experiments were conducted using the RAVEN. The experiments illustrated the system's ability to operate in extreme conditions using a variety of network settings.