Optimizing Robot-Assisted Surgery Suture Plans to Avoid Joint Limits and Singularities

Laparoscopic robots such as the da Vinci Research Kit encounter joint limits and singularities during procedures, leading to errors and prolonged operating times. We propose the Circle Suture Placement Problem to optimize the location and direction of four evenly-spaced stay sutures on surgical mesh for robot-assisted hernia surgery. We present an algorithm for this problem that runs in 0.4 seconds on a desktop equipped with commodity hardware. Simulated results integrating data from expert surgeon demonstrations suggest that optimizing over both suture position and direction increases dexterity reward by 11%-57% over baseline algorithms that optimize over either suture position or direction only.