Semi-Autonomous Laparoscopic Robotic Electro-Surgery with a Novel 3D Endoscope * Research reported in this paper was supported by National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers 1R01EB020610 and R21EB024707. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

This paper reports a robotic laparoscopic surgery system performing electro-surgery on porcine cadaver kidney, and evaluates its accuracy in an open loop control scheme to conduct targeting and cutting tasks guided by a novel 3D endoscope. We describe the design and integration of the novel laparoscopic imaging system that is capable of reconstructing the surgical field using structured light. A targeting task is first performed to determine the average positioning error of the system as guided by the laparoscopic camera. The imaging system is then used to reconstruct the surface of a porcine cadaver kidney, and generate a cutting trajectory with consistent depth. The paper concludes by using the robotic system in open loop control to cut this trajectory using a multi degree of freedom electro-surgical tool. It is demonstrated that for a cutting depth of 3 mm, the robotic surgical system follows the trajectory with an average depth of 2.44 mm and standard deviation of 0.34 mm. The average positional accuracy of the system was 2.74±0.99 mm.