Development of a robotic scrub nurse for the operating theatre

This paper describes how a robotic scrub nurse has been developed to assist human scrub nurses during surgical interventions. The robotic scrub nurse developed in this work is equipped with a voice recognition module to know the requested surgical instrument; it locates this element on a storage tray using computer vision and pattern recognition and picks the element from the tray placing it on an interchange tray where the human scrub nurse can finally pick the demanded instrument. Moreover, to develop the system, an electromagnetic gripper has been implemented to pick the instrument. There has been also installed a new connector in the robot arm to make available robot's digital outputs outside his structure. Nowadays the system which controls the robot can identify up to 7 surgical instruments and more than 20 spoken instructions and it has been used in the operating theatre of our research group (bioengineering institute).