Design for Interpretability: Meeting the Certification Challenge for Surgical Robots

This paper presents a perspective on some issues related to safety in the context of autonomous surgical robots. To meet the challenge of safety certification and bring about acceptance of the technology by the public, we propose principles for a design paradigm that goes in the direction of safety by construction: design with certification in mind, clearly distinguish the notion of safety from that of responsibility, view the human component as scaffolding in the progressive transfer of decision-making to the machine, preserve interpretability by renouncing black-box approaches, leverage interpretability to assign responsibility, and take corrective action only when the semantic of the human-machine interface is violated.