A hardware-in-the-loop simulator for safety training in robotic surgery

This paper presents a simulation-based safety training simulator for robot assisted surgery. While adverse events occur rarely during training, they could be fatal to the patients if they happen during real surgical procedures and are not handled properly by the surgical team. In this work we propose a hardware-in-the-loop robotic surgery simulator with high fidelity of the robot motion in a simulated environment, which is capable of reproducing adverse events during surgery. The proposed simulator is built upon the Raven-II open source surgical robot, integrated with a simulated surgeon console and a safety hazard injection engine, which automatically injects faults into modules of the robot control software. We simulate representative safety hazards seen in the adverse events, related to da VinciTM robot, reported to the FDA MAUDE database. A novel haptic feedback strategy is provided to the operator when the underlying dynamics differ from the real robot states.