A study on autonomous suturing task assignment in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery.

Background: Sutures are a set of standard actions which are accomplished by multi-instruments, researchers studied the robot autonomy of suturing, which was based on movement planning completed by a single instrument, but did not consider the assignment of suturing tasks to instruments.

Method: A method was proposed for the autonomous suturing task assignment to instruments, which built a comprehensive evaluation index under some constraint conditions to determine the optimal scheme of the suturing task assignment to instruments.

Results: An experiment of duodenal ulcer repair with a suturing operation was conducted under the guidance of a surgeon, and the results showed that the optimal scheme of the suturing task assignment was obtained by using the proposed method.

Conclusions: The proposed method can be used for autonomous suturing task assignment, which is beneficial for improving the intelligence of robot operation.