A Bioinspired Virtual Reality Toolkit for Robot-Assisted Medical Application: BioVRbot

The increasingly pervasive usage of robotic surgery not only calls for advances in clinical application but also implies high availability for preliminary medical education using virtual reality. Virtual reality is currently upgrading medical education by presenting complicated medical information in an immersive and interactive way. A system that allows multiple users to observe and operate via simulated surgical platforms using wearable devices has become an efficient solution for teaching where a real surgical platform is not available. This article developed a bioinspired virtual reality toolkit (BioVRbot) for education and training in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery. It allows multiple users to manipulate the robots working on cooperative virtual surgery using bioinspired control. The virtual reality scenario is implemented using unity and can be observed with independent virtual reality headsets. A MATLAB server is designed to manage robot motion planning of incremental teleoperation compliance with the remote center of motion constraints. Wearable sensorized gloves are adopted for continuous control of the tooltip and the gripper. Finally, the practical use of the developed surgical virtual system is demonstrated with cooperative operation tasks. It could be further spread into the classroom for preliminary education of robot-assisted surgery for early-stage medical students.