CAREER: Next-Generation Surgical Robots for Energy-based Surgery

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will enable a new class of surgical robots to treat disease via focused delivery of energy, without the need for physical contact with the affected tissue. The project will investigate multiple forms of energy, including lasers, radiofrequency, and ultrasonic waves. The project will create energy-based sensing modes that probe anatomical structures with a low-energy beam to determine their shape and thermal properties. These measurements, which can be updated in real-time even during a procedure, will allow safer and more precise removal of diseased tissue. Initially, all functions will be performed by command of a surgeon but because a robot is capable of reacting much faster than a human, the eventual goal of the project is to enable autonomous implementation of certain procedures. Energy-based surgical robots have the potential to improve public health by reducing surgical invasiveness, recovery times, and treatment costs, and by enabling entirely new procedures for life-threatening conditions that are currently considered inoperable. Participation of undergraduate and graduate students in this project will contribute to the training of the nation’s next generation of surgical robotics engineers. This research project will support the creation of a new framework of perception and control techniques to enable surgical robots that monitor and regulate the thermal effects created by their energy-based end effectors. The project will combine ideas and approaches from multiple areas of computer science and engineering, including heat transfer, finite element modeling, biomedical imaging, statistical state estimation, and nonlinear control theory. Expected scientific contributions include (1) new perception techniques that efficiently integrate thermal sensing, imaging, and physics-based simulations to infer critical patient information; (2) new control algorithms that leverage this enhanced perception to automatically regulate energy delivery and so achieve prescribed outcomes in the presence of uncertainty; and (3), strategies to appropriately integrate human operators into the control of robotic energy-based instruments. The expected long-term impact of this work will be to extend understanding of the interactions of robots with their environments beyond the analysis and control of contact forces, to incorporate non-contact functionality enabled by energy-based heat exchange and the control of structural temperatures. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.