Improving motion planning for surgical robot with active constraints

In this paper, an improved motion planning scheme is proposed for surgical robot control with multiple active constraints, including joint constraints, joint velocity constraints and remote center of motion constraints. It introduces an improved recurrent neural network (RNN) to optimize the online motion planning respect to multiple constraints. The demonstrated surgical operation trajectory is derived using teaching by demonstration. An improved motion planning scheme using the novel recurrent neural network is then designed to achieve the accurate task tracking under the multiple constraints. The general quadratic performance index is adopted to represent the constraints. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated using KUKA LWR4+ robot in a lab setup environment.