Sensorless Transparency Optimized Haptic Teleoperation on the da Vinci Research Kit

The da Vinci surgical robot introduced remote control of instruments, providing surgeons with increased dexterity and precision. A major drawback, however, is the loss of sense of touch due to a lack of kinesthetic coupling between the surgical field and the surgeon. This paper presents a framework for sensorless transparency optimized four channel teleoperation. It is sensorless because forces are estimated from existing actuator feedback, with a deep network for dynamics identification. Performance is further optimized by introducing robust acceleration control, with disturbance observers. Experiments performed on the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK), an open research platform based on the clinically deployed robotic hardware, show improvements in control, force estimation and reflection. The significance is that we demonstrate that high-performance bilateral teleoperation is feasible in clinical systems, without hardware changes, and is available to the dVRK community through a software update.