Efforts made under this NRI-CSA grant include a variety of improvements to existing software repositories and creation of new code bases that are publicly available to facilitate the development of future surgical robotic systems. 

 

Main efforts made under this grant can be categorized in 3 main categories of software:

  1. CISST repositories (cisst): Much of the software development in this project has been based on pre-existing open-source libraries developed at JHU and elsewhere.  Follow this link to find the most recent versions of these libraries.
  2. SAW updates: new software Interface modules for 3rd Party devices (sensing and Haptic Devices)
  3. Extension of the SAW-based da Vinci Research Kit repositories 
  4. Simulink Real-time Commander for dVRK robots and its documentation wiki.
  5. Simulink Real-time control of an XYZ cartesian stage robot.

See the links above for details on each of the main thrusts of code.

 

 

A number of device-specific software components with C++ and ROS interfaces were developed or updated for the NRI CSA grant to work with the SAW code base:
  - ATI force sensor: https://github.com/jhu-saw/sawATIForceSensor (new)
  - OptoForce sensor: https://github.com/jhu-saw/sawOptoforceSensor (new)
  - Force Dimension haptic devices: https://github.com/jhu-saw/sawForceDimensionSDK (new)
  - Sensable haptic devices: https://github.com/jhu-saw/sawSensablePhantom (updated)

The da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) is an open-source mechatronics platform for robotic surgery. For this grant, we did a number of re-design and reimplementation steps to ease integration of NRI CSA algorithms into that framework. Further, we developed new components using class derivation, dynamic loading, ROS and socket-based distributed architectures.

Repositories: 

https://github.com/jhu-dvrk/sawIntuitiveResearchKit 

https://github.com/jhu-dvrk/dvrk-ros

Much of the software development in this grant is based on pre-existing software repositories. This includes libraries for the Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST), in particular the Surgical Assistant Workstation (SAW), and extenstions to CISST to allow integration with the Robot Operating System (ROS). 

The repositories for these code-bases have accompanying documentations for better introduction to their inner workings.

External Repositories

- cisst: https://github.com/jhu-cisst/cisst

  This link provides access to the cisst libraries used for portability across operating systems and compilers, logging functionalities, dynamic creation, basic linear algebra, numerical routines and the component based multithreading support.

- cisst-ros: https://github.com/jhu-cisst/cisst-ros

   This link provides access to base routines to implement a bridge between the cisst component based libraries and ROS (the Robotic Operating System).

- Constraint controller: https://github.com/jhu-saw/sawConstraintController 

- ROS (not developed on this project, but used as a base) http://www.ros.org/