CRESSim: Simulator for Advancing Surgical Autonomy

Overview

Realistic and real-time surgical simulators play an increasingly important role in surgical robotics research, such as surgical robot learning and automation, and surgical skills assessment. The ability to simulate the diverse types of objects and contact-rich manipulation tasks, such as tissue cutting and blood suction, is important as they typically present in surgeries. We propose another surgical simulator for the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK), CRESSim, that enables simulating various contact-rich surgical tasks involving different surgical instruments, soft tissue, and body fluids. The real-world dVRK console and the master tool manipulator (MTM) robots are incorporated into the system to allow for teleoperation through virtual reality (VR). With CRESSim, we aim to advance surgical autonomy and augmented dexterity for surgeons by developing autonomous agents capable of completing surgical subtasks.

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