Toward increased autonomy in the surgical OR: needs, requests, and expectations.

Background: The current trend in surgery toward further trauma reduction inevitably leads to increased technological complexity. It must be assumed that this situation will not stay under the sole control of surgeons; mechanical systems will assist them. Certain segments of the work flow will likely have to be taken over by a machine in an automatized or autonomous mode.

Selective automation and skill transfer in medical robotics: a demonstration on surgical knot-tying.

Background: Transferring non-trivial human manipulation skills to robot systems is a challenging task. There have been a number of attempts to design research systems for skill transfer, but the level of the complexity of the actual skills transferable to the robot was rather limited, and delicate operations requiring a high dexterity and long action sequences with many sub-operations were impossible to transfer.

Methods: A novel approach to human-machine skill transfer for multi-arm robot systems is presented.