Mingl I 2004
Mingl I 2004
Mingl I 2004
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lnbmatlonal Confironce on R o b t l ~ &
New Orleans, LA npril2004
. Autornatlon
Absmct -I n Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) surgery, the Recent research on motion constraints usine Kumar’s svstem
operating volume is very limited. This is especially true in sinus [4,51 has focused on simple techniques for-“guidance ;irtual
surgery, when the instrument passes through the nasal and sinus fmtures”. This prior work focused on 2D geometric guidance
cavity to reach the pathological area. The nasal and sinus bones motion of the tool tip or camera and assumed that the tool or
impose geometric constraints on the work volume. During the
surgery, the surgeon needs to control the motion of the camera itself did not have any other environmental
instrument tip to accomplish some delicate proeedure; constraints.
meanwhile helshe needs to avoid hitting anatomic constraints. I n The focus of this paper is automatic generation of spatial
this paper, we present a method to assist the path following task motion constraints associated with complex 3D anatomy,
in a constrained area. The system reads the user’s force input based on preoperative medical images. In endoscopic sinus
and combines it with the planned tip-trajectory to create the tip surgery, the endoscope and other instruments have some
motion constraints; meanwhile it generates tbe, tool-shaft degree of translational and rotational 6eedom hut their motion
boundary constraints based on a 3-D geometric model. We map is constrained by anatomic structures. During surgery, the
instrument tip motion and boundary information to joint
instruments or the camera.should avoid collisions or excessive
displacements via robot kinematics, and then use a constrained
quadratic optimization algorithm to compute the optimal set of force on delicate anatomy while still moving in the desired
correspondingjoint displacements. In the preliminary study, we manner to accomplish the intended task. Constrained robot
show that robot guidance using cooperative control and vlrtual control has been discussed previously in both tele-
futures derived from complex geometry can assist users ‘in manipulation and cooperative manipulation contexts. Funda,
skilled manipulation tasks, while maintaining desirable Taylor, et al. [6] formulated desired motions as sets of task
properties such as collision avoidance and safely. goals in any number of coordinate 6ames relevant to the task,
optionally subject to additional linear constraints in each of
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I n d n Terms collaborative monippularion; virrvolf i f w e ; the task frames for redundant and deficient robots. The
optimirorion robot control; geomerry constraint geometric complexity of medical workspace constraints in
ENT makes this approach amactive for our current research.
I. INTRODUCnON In preliminary work [7] we applied the method of [6] to
In sinus surgery, medical instruments or an endoscope surgical environments in which motion constraints on a simple
camera are inserted through the nose into a sinus cavity. The path-following task are automatically derived from registered
surgeon must precisely manipulate these instruments based on pre-operative models created 6om 3D images. In this paper,
visual feedback from the endoscope and on information from we generalize these techniques to more general cooperative
preoperative 3D images such as CT. Although surgical ’
control cases in which virtual fixtures are automatically
navigation systems can track instruments relative to generated from registered preoperative medical images. First,
preoperative data [l], the difficulty of precise surgical we describe the system and algorithm for generating spatial
manipulation with endoscopic instruments makes endoscopic motion constraints derived from geometry. We then describe
sinus surgery a natural candidate application domain for implementation and experiments.
cooperatively controlled surgical robots. Fig. 1 conceptually illustrates the relationship between
The goal of human-machine collaborative systems the instrument, 3D path and approach apemre to the
(HMCS) research is to create mechanisms that selectively workspace cavity in our experiments. The surgical instrument
provide cooperative assistance to a human user (for us, a is a sharp-tipped pointer held either hy a robot or freehand. In
surgeon), while allowing the user to retain ultimate control of other cases it might he a surgical endoscope or a grasping
the procedure. Taylor e f al. [Z] developed an augmentation instrument. We use the term “tip frame” to refer to a
system for fine manipulation, and Kumar e f a/. [3] applied it coordinate system whose origin is at the tip of the pointer and
to microsurgical tasks such as inserting a needle into a 100 whose orientation is parallel to the tool holder of the robot.
micron retinal vessel. Virtual fixtures in a collaborative .The “tool boundary frame” is a coordinate system whose
system provide cooperative control of the manipulator by origin corresponds to the point on the tool that is closest to the
“stiffening” a hand-held guidance mechanism against certain surrounding anatomy and whose orientation is again parallel
directions of motion or forbidden regions of the workspace. to the tool holder.
I c m.
Fig. 1 Relationship between the tool, cavity,
approach ape-, and 3D path in OUT sample task
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The tip's motion is to be controlled by applying forces tree, each sub-space is defined in the orthogonal coordinate
and torques on the handle of the instlument, transformed to system of the eigenvectors centered at the center of mass of
produce forces f E R3 resolved into the coordinate system of the point set, and is recursively partitioned along this local
coordinate h m e . We rotate each local reference h e so that
the tool tip. We define a reference direction of motion
the x-ais is parallel to the eigenvector with the largest
D = D(r), and span and kernel projection operators
eigenvalue and the z-ais is parallel to the eigenvector with the
smallest eigenvalue. An important advantage of covariance
S'n(D) E [D]= D(DrDrDr trees is that the bounding boxes tend to be much tighter than
(3)
Ker(D)E ( D ) = I - [D] those found in conventional k-D trees and tend to align with
surfaces, thus producing a more efficient search.
We then define a function U = u(x,S) computing a signed The tree is built recursively as follows. Given a set of
distance fiom the tool tip to the task motion target (e.g., an points {si) sampled from the surface, we find the centroid
anatomical feature or desired tool path). The new preferred and moments
direction is then defined as
(4)
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d,, on the line segment. If the distance not collide with the cavity boundary as a result of the motion.
For each potential contact point pair we get a constraint of the
IlC-,* -J-,*Il c , we recursively search the left and right general form
sub-trees for points of close approach to (a,&). When the nl ( $ + A P - < ) ~ E (10)
search is complete, we transform all point pairs back into the
world coordinate system. If there are no point pairs closer where $ is the position of the potential collision point on the
than e,,,, we generate no boundary constraints for the tool and 4 is the position of the potential contact point on the
current time step of the control. surface. $ and 4 are the closest point pair we generated by
One difficulty with this approach is that it tends to the method described in last section. na is the normal of the
produce many point pairs from the same patch of anatomy that
are almost equivalent, thus producing an excessive number of contact point on the surface, and E is a small positive number
motion control constraints. Therefore, in practice we modify (0.01 in our experiments). Constraint (IO) indicates that the
our search as follows: For any non-terminal node with angle between (P,+ APk - 5)and nbr is less than 90'. We can
-ddel1< that is vely flat (i.e., with ,i -& <,
also defme an objective function =IIW,AP,II expressing the
desirahility of minimizing extraneous motion of the tool near
smaller than a specified value) and for which the line segment
the boundary, and can again rewrite these formulae in terms of
does not penetrate the bounding box, we simply return the
4:
point pair(Cd,dd) without further recursion.
C. Control Algorithm Implementation 5. = IIw,AelI
(1 1)
We have experimented with both velocity and "Jk (4142 h'
incremental step position control. In the discussion below, we
Currently,we use vely low values (0.001) for wt and rely
will use the latter. Thus, at each time step, the goal is to
compute incremental joint motions Aq , which then are fed to mainly on the inequality constraints. An alternative would
low-level position servos. have been to leave the 5, term out of the optimization
We compute desired tool tip velocity using the altogether. The number of boundary constraints is dynamically
admittance law described above, and convert this to an changed because it depends on how many closest-point pairs
incremental 6-DOF tool motion we generate based on the relative position of the tool and the
Y*.&= ( ( ~ , # . ~ ~ A t(O,O,O))T,
f)ll where At is the sample geomeby constraint.
Joint limits: Finally, we want to ensure that none of the
interval. We identify 3 classes of requirements: in the tip joint limits are exceeded as a result of the motion. This
frame, tool boundary frame, and in joint space. For each, we requirement can be stated as, q- - q s Aq s,4 -4, where q
defme an objective function to be minimized and a set of
is the vector of the current values of the joint variables, and
linearized constraints.
q- and q, denote the vectors of lower and upper bounds
Tool tip motion: We require that an incremental tool tip
motion be as close as possible to some desired value. We on the joint variables respectively. We also want to minimize
express this as: the total motion of the joints. This can be rewritten in the
form
5-,# = 1% - Ae,.J <,n, =IIWp,.'%l'
(8) (12)
AP*.&T.U, >I-& H p m . A q 2 h,,,
5-,# = llKq4J,*(~)iq-Y<J (9) Again, we set w , ~ , to 0.001 and simply enforce the
%*J,q(q)iq 2 h,
inequality constraints.
where H,*.& =U,.,', h, = I - & and W, = diag{w,) Putfing it together: We combine all the task constraints
denotes a diagonal matrix of weighting factors specifylng the and objective functions, and then obtain the overall
relative importance of each component of Y w .Since we optimizationproblem, which is:
want to @ackthe path tightly, we set w, to a fairly high value
(1 in the current experiments).
Boundary construin@: Since the instrument is inserted
into a cavity, we want to ensure that the instrument itself will
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subject to
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tool shaft portjan
Fig. 6 Magnitude of position crmr using Robot guidance (solid line) m d
ig. 5 Trajectories of the tool during the path following procedure. (le freehand (dashed line). x-axis(-): the parameter in B-spline parameter
le swept volume of the tool path, (fight) the relative position beween t domain, y-axis(-): the magnitude of the position error
tool and the nasal cavity.
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