Automatic Field of View Control of Laparoscopes with Soft RCM Constraints

In this paper, a novel method is proposed to implement automatic field of view control of laparoscopes. The laparoscope is visually controlled to follow moving surgical tools under remote center of motion (RCM) constraints introduced by minimally invasive surgery (MIS). A vision-based tracking algorithm is designed for view plane and view depth control. The view plane is controlled by visually tracking point features on surgical tools. And the view depth is controlled based on distance features in the image plane. During this process, the RCM constraints on laparoscope manipulation are implemented softly. And a pose generator of the laparoscope is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by simulation and experiment results.