GESRsim: Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Surgical Robot Simulator

Abstract

Robot-assisted gastrointestinal endoscopic surgery (GES) as a kind of natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (NOTES) is the next-generation minimally invasive surgery (MIS). Besides, rendering certain autonomy to a Gas-trointestinal Endoscopic Surgical Robot (GESR) is promising but highly challenging. Therefore, to accelerate the development and augment the autonomy of GESR, we use CoppeliaSim to develop the first robotic simulator for the GESR system (GESRsim) based on our previous design. The GESRsim provides several 3D models and kinematics of our designed manipulators and endoscopic snake bone. Additionally, we build several scenes for robotic GES training and then utilize different programming interfaces to perform teleoperation. Furthermore, several advanced control algorithms, including visual servoing (VS) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL), are implemented to verify the performance of the GESRsim.