Inducing Performance of Commercial Surgical Robots in Space.

Area of Science:

• Robotics
• Control Systems Engineering
• Surgical Technology

Background:

• Surgical robotic systems present challenges for retrofitting new performance improvements due to integrated electronics.
• Existing systems require methods to impose enhanced functionality without complete redesign.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate and compare various methods for enhancing the performance of pre-existing surgical robotic systems.
• To evaluate modern approaches against idealized benchmarks and current systems.

Main Methods:

• Compared a dozen modern control approaches, including idealized cases for benchmarking.
• Applied methods to non-idealized systems, incorporating noisy sensor fusion and fictional forces.
• Evaluated prefiltering, velocity control, and Pontryagin's methods (Hamiltonian minimization, adjoint equations).

Main Results:

• Prefiltered open-loop optimal + transport decoupling demonstrated superior performance.
• The best method achieved 1-3% attitude tracking accuracy for robotic instruments.
• This approach reduced computational burden by 2% without increasing costs.

Conclusions:

• Prefiltered open-loop optimal + transport decoupling is a highly effective method for surgical robot enhancement.
• Modern control strategies can significantly improve existing robotic systems efficiently.
• The study provides a benchmark for evaluating performance enhancement techniques in surgical robotics.