A Framework of Real2Sim Teleoperation System for Evaluating Surgical Robotic Tool Design

During the process of designing a surgical robotic tool, a teleoperation system is necessary to evaluate the tool design in a simulated environment via virtual surgical tasks. It is possible to build such a system by involving a physical da Vinci Surgical System (dVSS) and using its master tool manipulator (MTM) to teleoperate the virtual robotic tool for evaluation. However, extensive testing and debugging require a more general and portable teleoperation system. In this work, we propose a general framework for establishing a real-to-sim teleoperation system. In the system, the real robot's Cartesian pose is first transformed, scaled, and mapped into the sim robot's coordinate system. Then, the resulting pose, as the desired pose of the sim robot, will proceed through a numerical inverse kinematics (IK) solver. The numerical IK solution is used to update the current joint configuration of the sim robot, which enables an independent and compact teleoperation system. Additionally, the numerical IK solution can be channeled to other simulation platforms for visualizing the sim robot with joint command control, where various virtual surgical tasks can be designed and conducted for further tool evaluation. Preliminary experiments were conducted to evaluate an established Omni-to-Unity teleoperation system, and the system's stability, accuracy, and usability were assessed and verified by the experimental results. The established teleoperation system can be used to streamline and facilitate robotic tool design and evaluation. Furthermore, the proposed real 2 sim framework can be easily adapted to a variety of application scenarios where both the real and sim robots can be specified by the user for different purposes.