Retinal surgery is a complex medical procedure that requires exceptional expertise and dexterity. For this purpose, several robotic platforms are currently being developed to enable or improve the outcome of microsurgical tasks. Since the control of such robots is often designed for navigation inside the eye in proximity to the retina, successful trocar docking and inserting the instrument into the eye represents an additional cognitive effort, and is, therefore, one of the open challenges in robotic retinal surgery. For this purpose, we present a platform for autonomous trocar docking that combines computer vision and a robotic setup. Inspired by the Cuban Colibri (hummingbird) aligning its beak to a flower using only vision, we mount a camera onto the endeffector of a robotic system. By estimating the position and pose of the trocar, the robot is able to autonomously align and navigate the instrument towards the Trocar's Entry Point (TEP) and finally perform the insertion. Our experiments show that the proposed method is able to accurately estimate the position and pose of the trocar and achieve repeatable autonomous docking. The aim of this work is to reduce the complexity of robotic setup preparation prior to the surgical task and therefore, increase the intuitiveness of the system integration into the clinical workflow.

翻译：视网膜外科是一种复杂的医疗程序,需要特殊的专门知识和灵巧性。为此目的,目前正在开发若干机器人平台,以促成或改善显微外科任务的结果。由于对此类机器人的控制往往设计在视网膜附近的眼睛内导航,成功对流和将仪器插入视网膜是一种额外的认知努力,因此,这是机器人视网膜外科手术的公开挑战之一。为此目的,我们提出了一个自动对接平台,将计算机视觉和机器人装置结合起来。在古巴的Colibri(蜂鸟)的启发下,我们仅用视觉将其嘴对准花朵,我们将一台照相机安装在机器人系统的终端影响器上。通过估计轮盘的方位和形状,机器人能够自主地对仪器进行调整和导航到Trocar的视网关入口(TEP),并最终进行插入。我们的实验表明,拟议方法能够准确估计弦盘的位置和姿势,并实现可重复的自动对接。这项工作的目的是降低手术系统的复杂性,从而降低手术前的整合。