Surgical robot automation has attracted increasing research interest over the past decade, expecting its potential to benefit surgeons, nurses and patients. Recently, the learning paradigm of embodied intelligence has demonstrated promising ability to learn good control policies for various complex tasks, where embodied AI simulators play an essential role to facilitate relevant research. However, existing open-sourced simulators for surgical robot are still not sufficiently supporting human interactions through physical input devices, which further limits effective investigations on how the human demonstrations would affect policy learning. In this work, we study human-in-the-loop embodied intelligence with a new interactive simulation platform for surgical robot learning. Specifically, we establish our platform based on our previously released SurRoL simulator with several new features co-developed to allow high-quality human interaction via an input device. We showcase the improvement of our simulation environment with the designed new features, and validate effectiveness of incorporating human factors in embodied intelligence through the use of human demonstrations and reinforcement learning as a representative example. Promising results are obtained in terms of learning efficiency. Lastly, five new surgical robot training tasks are developed and released, with which we hope to pave the way for future research on surgical embodied intelligence. Our learning platform is publicly released and will be continuously updated in the website: https://med-air.github.io/SurRoL.

翻译：手术机器人自动化在过去十年中吸引了越来越多的研究兴趣，其有望为外科医生、护士和患者带来益处。近年来，具身智能的学习范式在各类复杂任务中展现出学习优质控制策略的强大能力，其中具身人工智能模拟器在推动相关研究中发挥了关键作用。然而，现有开源的手术机器人仿真环境仍未能充分支持通过物理输入设备实现人机交互，这进一步限制了关于人类演示如何影响策略学习的有效研究。本文研究了面向手术机器人学习的新型交互仿真平台中的人机协同具身智能。具体而言，我们在先前发布的SurRoL仿真器基础上构建平台，通过协同开发多项新特性，实现了通过输入设备进行高质量人机交互。我们展示了所设计新特性对仿真环境的改进，并以人类演示与强化学习的结合为代表案例，验证了在具身智能中融入人为因素的有效性，在学习效率方面取得了令人鼓舞的成果。最后，我们开发并发布了五项新的手术机器人训练任务，期望以此为基础推动手术具身智能的未来研究。我们的学习平台已公开并将在网站（https://med-air.github.io/SurRoL）持续更新。