Gaze Teleoperation of a Surgical Robot Endoscope for Minimal Invasive Surgery

Abstract

This paper presents an innovative approach for controlling an endoscope during robot assisted minimally invasive surgery through the gaze of the surgeon. This system incorporates an eye tracking device which captures the 2D gaze fixation of the surgeon. An event detection algorithm is used in discriminating the fixations and these are sent as UDP to an Arduino microcontroller device where it is used to control two servo motors. The endoscope is attached to the two servos which generates it motion in two different planes which corresponds to the target gaze coordinates of the endoscope fixation point. Experimental results show the effectiveness and robustness of the gaze-based system in intuitively controlling the endoscope.