Live Thread Reconstruction for Autonomous Manipulation

Overview & Synopsis

Autonomous robotic surgery has drawn increased attention in recent years due to its potential to relieve surgeons of time-consuming, mentally straining, and tedious tasks, particularly during prolonged operations. One suitable task for automation is suturing, which involves tracking the thread as it deforms during needle retrieval, de-tangling, knot tightening, and other tasks. Unlike rigid-object manipulation, deformable thread manipulation has no fixed pose to track and effectively infinite degrees of freedom, making its configuration difficult to predict and requiring the thread's state to be re-estimated rather than assumed. At the same time, thread manipulations involve sequential motions that depend on past and current thread contact points, which must be accurately and continuously tracked. This paper presents an image-to-manipulation pipeline that concurrently generates live thread reconstruction while conducting safe and optimized sequential manipulations to achieve long-horizon tasks.