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Find and fix ‘bugs’ in surgical robots

CARNEGIE MELLON / JOHNS HOPKINS (US) — Researchers have used a new technique to detect glitches in the software that controls surgical robots.

The team analyzed a control algorithm for a research robot that would help a surgeon perform surgery at the base of the skull.



“These techniques are going to change how people build robotic surgery systems,” predicts Yanni Kouskoulas of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Kouskoulas led the research study with André Platzer, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.


When testing fails

Surgical robots are an example of a hybrid, or cyber-physical system. These complex, computer-controlled devices are becoming increasingly common. Other examples are aircraft collision avoidance systems, high-speed train controls, and cars that avoid collisions, maintain their lanes, or otherwise drive themselves.




But methods that work for computer circuitry or software, which may be complex but have a finite number of states, don’t work for hybrid systems that must contend with the infinite variations of the physical world.



‘Something unexpected could go wrong’




Kouskoulas says the robot and the control algorithm were tested extensively, including on cadavers. “While it worked in the configurations in which it was tested, the fear was always that something unexpected could go wrong,” he notes.


The tool generated examples of how this could occur. “It leads you to the problem,” Kouskoulas explains. “You then have to be creative to find the solution.”


The National Science Foundation supported this study.

The researchers will present their findings April 11 at HSCC 2013, the Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control conference in Philadelphia. Other members of the study team are David Renshaw, a student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon, and Peter Kazanzides, associate research professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins.

Source: Carnegie Mellon University

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