Intermittent Visual Servoing: Efficiently Learning Policies Robust to Instrument Changes for High-precision Surgical Manipulation

Samuel Paradis,Minho Hwang,Brijen Thananjeyan,Jeffrey Ichnowski,Daniel Seita,Danyal Fer,Thomas Low,Joseph E. Gonzalez,Ken Goldberg,Samuel Paradis,Minho Hwang,Brijen Thananjeyan,Jeffrey Ichnowski,Daniel Seita,Danyal Fer,Thomas Low,Joseph E. Gonzalez,Ken Goldberg

Assisting surgeons with automation of surgical subtasks is challenging due to backlash, hysteresis, and variable tensioning in cable-driven robots. These issues are exacerbated as surgical instruments are changed during an operation. In this work, we propose a framework for automation of high- precision surgical subtasks by learning local, sample-efficient, accurate, closed-loop policies that use ...