Hongqiang Sang

Background: Compared with traditional open surgery, robotic‐assisted minimally invasive surgery lacks force sensing ability.Methods: A sensorless transparency optimised force safety mechanism is put forward to improve the external force safety of the surgical robot in this paper. An improved fixed‐time indirect adaptive fuzzy controller is proposed to approximate the unknown uncertainties in the dynamics of the patient‐side manipulator. An online force simulation controller is designed based on the hierarchical force.Results: Simulations and experiments demonstrate that the designed fixed‐time indirect adaptive fuzzy controller exhibits excellent performance in trajectory tracking, fixed‐time convergence, fuzzy approximation, and smooth control input. In addition, the online force simulation controller effectively decreases the force in the potentially unsafe area, thereby inhibiting the unsafe force.Conclusions: This mechanism offers potential applications to improve the safety of external forces for the sensorless surgical robots.

Background: In recent years, laparoscopic surgical robots have rapidly developed. However, most focus on the overall robotic systems, with few summaries on the laparoscopic surgical robots and the master manipulators.Methods: This paper provides a summary and analysis of typical laparoscopic surgical robots, including the strengths and limitations of existing laparoscopic surgical robots. Additionally, the master manipulators are analysed and summarised from four aspects: structural design and optimization, time‐varying delays, tremor suppression and force feedback. Further classification and summary are made based on the different methods used in each study.Results: Laparoscopic surgical robots and the master manipulators still have some limitations. Therefore, the development trends of the laparoscopic surgical robots and the master manipulators are discussed from four aspects: structural materials, remote surgery, intelligence and human–machine interaction.Conclusion: With the continuous advancement of technology, laparoscopic surgical robots will play an increasingly important role in the field of surgery.

The motion accuracy, compliance, and control smoothness for the surgical robot are of great importance to improve the safety of human-robot interaction. Ho

Ship detection based on wave gliders plays an important role in tasks such as maritime patrols, target tracking, and maritime traffic control. However, the complex and diverse sea environment, as well as the large differences in the appearance and scale of ships on the sea, have led to traditional detection algorithms experiencing issues such as false detection, missed detection of small targets, and incomplete detection of ship mast areas in ship detection tasks. To alleviate this dilemma, we designed a ship detector named YOLOv7-ship based on YOLOv7-tiny. Firstly, we introduce a parameter-free attention module (SimAM) in the backbone network to search for attention regions in the scene, thereby helping to solve the problem of false detection under complex marine environment interference. Secondly, we designed a mixed upsampling feature fusion method and specifically added a small target detection layer to enhance the detection of small targets. Finally, we introduce Wise-IOU into the loss function, and carry out different gradient gain allocation strategies in stages to solve the problem of incomplete detection of ship mast. The experimental results show that the YOLOv7-ship detector we designed achieves [email protected] 99.4% and 81.1% on the public dataset SeaShips and our wave glider dataset WG-Ships, respectively, while maintaining real-time inference speed and outperforming most mainstream models in performance.

Background: With the expansion of minimally invasive surgery (MIS) applications in surgery, the remote centre of motion (RCM) manipulator requires a more flexible workspace to meet different operation requirements. Thus, the mechanical structure and motion control of the RCM manipulator play important roles.Methods: A multi‐objective genetic algorithm was exploited to maximise the kinematic performance and obtain a compact structure of the RCM manipulator. An inverse kinematic solution method is proposed to meet task accuracy and kinematic singularity avoidance constraints for safety motion control.Results: Simulation results demonstrate that there are significant improvements in the reachable workspace inside the abdominal cavity, the flexibility of the workspace, kinematic performance, and compactness of the RCM manipulator. Experiments verify the feasibility of the prototype and the validity of the proposed inverse kinematic solution method.Conclusions: This enhances the adaptability and safety of the RCM manipulator and provides potential prospects for MIS application.