APH Special Issue on Platforms for Medical Robotics Research

 

At last, we are happy to present you the most recent special issue of Acta Polytechnica Hungarica on surgical robot research, by eds. T. Haidegger, P. Kazanzides and B. Hannaford.

"Medical robotics have been around us for 3 decades, yet today there is an unprecedented rise in applications and systems. Surgical robotics is entering new domains such as single site surgeries and advanced decision making support, requiring highly sophisticated manipulation capabilities. The coming generations of medical and surgical robots may not only function as an agile extension of the human eyes and hands, but will also become a skillful and coordinated partner for their human counterpart. In the last couple of years, outreach and community formation activities are gradually following the individual technical developments, striving to establish an R&D ecosystem.

Shared hardware and software platforms for robotic systems can foster collaboration between groups and accelerate the progress of technology development. In the medical robotics community, a variety of common research platforms and software frameworks have emerged, such as the RAVEN-II, the da Vinci Research Kit (DVRK) and the KUKA Lightweight Arm. The goals of this Special Issue are to more broadly engage the medical/surgical robotics community, present the latest developments, and to define the road map for future enhancements to these platforms. Some of these initiatives are supported by government initiatives as well, such as the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Robotics Initiative (NRI) grant “Collaborative Research: Software Framework for Research in Semi-Autonomous Teleoperation”, and social media initiatives, such as the SurgRob blog."

In this issue:

• The Raven Open Surgical Robotic Platforms: A Review and Prospect by Yangming Li, Blake Hannaford, and Jacob Rosen
• An Approach to Modeling Closed-Loop Kinematic Chain Mechanisms, Applied to Simulations of the da Vinci Surgical System by Radian A Gondokaryono, Ankur Agrawal, Adnan Munawar, Christopher J Nycz, and Gregory S Fischer
• A Compliance Model to Improve the Accuracy of the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) by Grace Chrysilla, Nickolas Eusman, Anton Deguet, and Peter Kazanzides
• A DVRK-based Framework for Surgical Subtask Automation by Tamás D. Nagy and Tamás Haidegger
• Portable dVRK: an augmented V-REP simulator of the da Vinci Research Kit by Giuseppe Andrea Fontanelli, Mario Selvaggio, Marco Ferro, Fanny Ficuciello, Marilena Vendittelli, and Bruno Siciliano
• Needle Navigation and Catheter Reconstruction for Breast Brachytherapy Using Open Source Software by Thomas A Vaughan, Harry Brastianos, Tamas Ungi, Andras Lasso, Conrad Falkson, Gabor Fichtinger
• Probabilistic Method to Improve the Accuracy of Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems by Tamás Haidegger
• Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgical Skill Assessment—Manual and Automated Platforms by Renáta Nagyné Elek and Tamás Haidegger
• Safety of Surgical Robots and IEC 80601-2-77: The First International Standard for Surgical Robots by Kiyoyuki Chinzei 

Happy reading!