Augmenting Surgical Perception

While offering clinical and ergonomic benefits, teleoperated surgical robots substantially change the perceptual feedback available to surgeons. Direct manipulation heavily relies on touch, but most robots provide no haptic feedback due to challenges in both sensing and closed-loop stability. About 15 years ago, my team invented a practical and effective way to add haptic feedback to such systems. VerroTouch measures, transmits, and actuates the naturalistic instrument vibrations that are mainly caused by transient contact; this type of vibrotactile feedback facilitates acquisition and evaluation of surgical skill. Contact forces can also be estimated by visually observing the instruments and the soft materials they touch, much as experienced surgeons do. Though more developed than haptics, the visual feedback provided by teleoperated surgical robots can also be improved. Surgeons appreciate our interactive approach to visual augmented reality, particularly praising voice commands and accurate 3D measurements. Finally, we have come to believe that viewing the surgical field from a single stereoscopic viewpoint limits depth perception, anatomical visibility, safety, and future autonomy. We thus recently created the first da Vinci Research Kit with two controllable stereo endoscopes and are exploring the potential of multi-view surgical telerobotics.

Biography

Katherine J. Kuchenbecker is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Stuttgart, Germany, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Stuttgart. She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering with Günter Niemeyer at Stanford University in 2006, did postdoctoral research with Allison M. Okamura at the Johns Hopkins University, and was an engineering professor in the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania from 2007 to 2016. Her research blends haptics, teleoperation, physical human-robot interaction, tactile sensing, and medical applications. She delivered a TEDYouth talk on haptics in 2012 and has been honored with a 2009 NSF CAREER Award, the 2012 IEEE RAS Academic Early Career Award, a 2014 Penn Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, elevation to IEEE Fellow in 2021, and various best paper, poster, demonstration, and reviewer awards. She co-chaired the IEEE Haptics Symposium in 2016 and 2018 and was Editor-in-Chief of the 2025 IEEE World Haptics Conference.