Revisiting the da Vinci
While I was back to
Intuitive in February to meet some of their great people, I started to collect
some interesting systems developed by external groups to work with the da
Vinci. (Beyond the in-house development, such as the single-site tools.)
Primarily, the MIMIC dV trainer has already become
an integrated producut of Intuitive. You can learn more about the origins ofthe simulator here. There have been
other HW+SW simulators developed as well; the most advanced is probably the RoSS,but these is also an interesting one from China, where they fully identified the kinematic parameters of the
robot.
Many groups got
interested in working with the da Vinci (e.g. for skill assessment and event analysis), but only few got the chance to easily hook up with the system using
the research API. As Intuitive puts it, it is closed for
conficentiality, safety reasons, to support resources and the provide
competitive advantage to key partners. To our knowledge), only the Hopkins group has a read-write API. Thus people at UPenn developed the
VerroTouch system, that uses accelerometers to identify all motions of the
arms. (More details here.)
Further, BlakeHannaford’s group (Biorobotics Lab) at UW came out with the concept of SurgTrak, an affordable da Vinici data recording tool. The system consists
of synchronized video and surgical tool motion recording unified by custom
software. Video is recorded at up to 30 frames per second from the DVI output
of the da Vinci master console using an Epiphan DVI2USB device. Tool
motion data is recorded at 30 Hz. Tool position and orientation are captured
with a 3D Guidance trakSTAR magnetic tracking system. Grasper and wrist
position is recorded by measuring the angular position of the four spindles driving
the four tool degrees of freedom. Custom USB-enabled hardware was developed for
this task including a set of inexpensive potentiometers that extract absolute
spindle angle as well as additional environmental signals such as tool contact.
Data streams from the video recording, position recording and wrist signal
recording are united using Visual C++ software running on a Windows 7 based
laptop computer utilizing the windows multimedia timer to enforce a consistent
sampling rate.
Of course, new
instruments require new design of the OR, for which you can find someguidelines here.
Image credit: - Intuitive:
History, Present, Future of Robotic Surgery, 2011
- UPenn
Comments