EndoBot: a Robotic Assistant in Minimally Invasive Surgeries

This paper presents a new surgical robotic system called EndoBot for assisting surgeons in performing minimally invasive surgery (MIS). The EndoBot is designed for collaborative operation between the surgeon and the robot. The demand on the surgeon is higher during suturing task which is the primary tissue approximation method and has been known as one of the most difficult tasks in MIS. Our work is the first effort in autonomous robotic suturing for MIS. In this paper, we show the motion controller design for autonomous and shared control mode and discuss autonomous robotic-suturing algorithms.