Safe and Fast Path Planner for Minimally Invasive Surgery

Path planning of a tool in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) can provide assistance to the surgeons by giving solutions for faster and safe tool movements during the surgery. However, the main challenge in this problem is to address non-uniform tool shape for planning that can change due to the tool’s dexterity. A typical robotic path planning approach by describing the robot’s feasible movements using C-space is applied in this work. Unlike the robotic path planning problem, the C-space description capturing the movement does not give any closed-form solution due to high degree of freedom associated with the tool moved by human hands. Hence, an interval-based approach is used for describing the C-space. The proposed interval-based approach is capable of dividing the space into feasible and non-feasible intervals of different sizes which helps to reduce the search area and cover the obstacles in a refined manner. This paper presents collision-free and fast path computation using interval arithmetic between any two points in a 2D- surgical environment cluttered with obstacles for a surgical tool robot.