ROSurgical: An Open-Source Framework for Telesurgery

Abstract

The advent of surgical robots has significantly enhanced the precision and efficiency of surgical procedures, paving the way for remote operation and telesurgery. Despite its potential for delivering expert care to remote regions and aiding in surgical training, the widespread adoption of telesurgery has been hindered by various challenges. To overcome these barriers and make telesurgery more accessible to the robotics community, we introduce ROSurgical. This open-source, ROS-based framework is engineered for the streamlined control of medical robots in telesurgery environments. ROSurgical enables plug-and-play operations of ROS-based robotic systems in telesurgical settings, while ensuring high security, reduced complexity, and reliable latency measurements. We demonstrate the framework's versatility in three scenarios: catheter ab-lation, ophthalmic microsurgery, and uterus endoscopy, with the catheter ablation experiments conducted internationally between Zurich and Madrid. Our experiments highlight RO-Surgical's seamless integration and its potential to lower the barriers to telesurgery adoption.