A Digital Twin for Telesurgery under Intermittent Communication

2024-11-20

arXiv.org

AI Summary

To address task interruption in telesurgery under weak-network conditions—such as in rural or battlefield settings—caused by communication latency and intermittent disconnections, this paper proposes a digital twin system tailored for the da Vinci surgical robot. Our approach introduces a novel “buffer–replay–compensation” coordination mechanism: (1) a high-fidelity digital twin is constructed via physics-based modeling; (2) during network outages, surgeon commands are buffered in real time and used to drive continuous virtual-end interaction; and (3) upon reconnection, trajectory replay combined with latency compensation control automatically synchronizes the physical robot, enabling seamless task resumption. Experimental evaluation on the peg-transfer task demonstrates a 23% reduction in average completion time compared to baseline methods, significantly enhancing the robustness, continuity, and execution efficiency of telesurgery under degraded network conditions.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair
• Intelligent Robots: Manipulation
• Multiagent Systems: Teamwork

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

Telesurgery is an effective way to deliver service from expert surgeons to areas without immediate access to specialized resources. However, many of these areas, such as rural districts or battlefields, might be subject to different problems in communication, especially latency and intermittent periods of communication outage. This challenge motivates the use of a digital twin for the surgical system, where a simulation would mirror the robot hardware and surgical environment in the real world. The surgeon would then be able to interact with the digital twin during communication outage, followed by a recovery strategy on the real robot upon reestablishing communication. This paper builds the digital twin for the da Vinci surgical robot, with a buffering and replay strategy that reduces the mean task completion time by 23% when compared to the baseline, for a peg transfer task subject to intermittent communication outage. The relevant code can be found here: https://github.com/LCSR-CIIS/dvrk_digital_twin_teleoperation.

Problem

• Addressing telesurgery challenges in intermittent communication environments
• Developing a digital twin for da Vinci surgical robot
• Reducing task completion time during communication outages

Innovation

• Digital twin mirrors surgical robot and environment
• Buffering and replay strategy reduces completion time
• Recovery strategy upon reestablished communication