Article intro - Autonomy in Surgical Robotics

A great review article appeared in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters: Aleks Attanasio, Bruno Scaglioni, Elena De Momi, Paolo Fiorini, Pietro Valdastri: Autonomy in Surgical Robotics

"Stemming from the dichotomy between “automatic” and “autonomous” behaviour of a surgical robot, this review maps the levels of autonomy and lists the main enabling technologies that are driving the research in this field. The paper is organized in five main sections, according to increasing levels of autonomy. At Level-0, where the bulk of commercial platforms is, the robot is not allowed any autonomy. At Level-1, the robot can provide cognitive and physical assistance to the surgeon, while at Level-2, it can autonomously perform a surgical task. Level-3 comes with conditional autonomy, providing the robot with the ability to plan a task and update planning during execution. Finally, the robot at Level-4 can plan and execute a sequence of surgical tasks autonomously"