A scalable system for real-time control of dexterous surgical robots

The requisite cabling and control processing for surgical robots can become unwieldy as dexterity is increased, due to the additional degrees of freedom. Motivated by dexterous snake-like robots for minimally invasive surgery, this paper details the development of a low-level control system that uses IEEE 1394 (FireWire), linking the computer to low-latency field-programmable gate arrays, to distribute I/O while centralizing all control computations. A standard programming interface is defined as part of the control system to enhance its scalability. These features increase the viability of complex surgical robots and ease their development by reducing cables and enabling the processing of many axes of control on a single computer.