Towards Human-Robot Collaborative Surgery: Trajectory and Strategy Learning in Bimanual Peg Transfer

While the traditional control of surgical robots relies on fully manual teleoperations, human-robot collaborative systems promise to address issues such as workspace constrains and laborious tasks. In particular, shared control can reduce the surgeon's workload and improve the overall surgical performance by supporting the surgeon effort during movements while keeping them in charge of complex control phases. In this letter, we propose a segmentation of the bimanual peg transfer task that alternates manual and autonomous control correspondingly. The authority allocation in this shared control framework considers both the limitation of learning-based methods and the higher dexterity of humans during physical interaction. The motion and strategies are transferred from an expert human to a da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) using an epsilon-greedy on a maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning algorithm. The model generated enables to train an intelligent agent that can skillfully collaborate with the human operator during the surgical task. The proposed shared control framework is verified both on a virtual platform and then on a real dVRK to assess its usability and robustness. The results show that, compared to traditional teleoperation, our method can achieve faster and more consistent peg transfers. An analysis of the participants' effort also reveals a significantly lower perception of the workload.