Suture Looping Task Pose Planner in a Constrained Surgical Environment

We present a task pose planner for a robustly safe automation of suture looping tasks in robotic assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS). Our approach uses pre-planned spiral looping trajectories and computes the task pose using a combination of linear programming for position optimization and a brute force iterative orientation search. The optimization maximizes the minimum distance from constraints to account for any uncertainties. We verify our approach in a simulation to be effective in avoiding instrument-tissue collisions, suture entanglement and effective length constraints, and gripper joint limits. In addition, it allows us to create a map that provides the task pose quality at suture exit point locations. With the map, we are able to identify task poses for multiple suture exit points and suitable port placements.