Development of a multimodal skills trainer for minimally invasive telerobotic surgery

This paper gives an overview of the components and integration of the prototype for a multimodal skills training system developed for Minimally Invasive Telerobotic Surgery (MITS), which is based on DLR's Miro-Surge system. It describes the technological components and integration of the Hardware and Software platform. Furthermore, it presents the first integrated training environment and assessment scheme. The MITS skills trainer consists of a surgical workstation, providing force and 3D visual feedback, which is identical with the real workstation and a VR environment, in which the robotic systems and the training environment is simulated, and which can be controlled depending on the training situation and difficulty level.