Development and Evaluation of a Single-arm Robotic System for Autonomous Suturing

This article introduces a novel suture managing device (SMD) and new suture management controller to enable single-arm suture management during autonomous suturing with the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR). The primary function of the SMD is to tension and manage the suture thread, a task that was previously carried out by a second manipulator or a human assistant. The SMD and its controller are integrated into STAR's autonomous suturing workflow. Experiments were conducted to quantify the tensioning force of SMD and to evaluate the suture quality of the new single-arm system. The prototype of SMD achieves 1.67N tensioning force with suturing time of 29.1±0.42 seconds per stitch. Our study results demonstrate that the single-arm STAR system with SMD achieves equivalent performance to our previous works in suturing efficiency where suture management was performed with either a dual-armed robotic system or by a human surgical assistant. The study's findings contribute to the field of medical robotics and to our knowledge represent the first known instance of single-arm suturing with suture management during autonomous anastomosis.