An application of artificial intelligence to medical robotics

In this paper an application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Medical Robotics is described. Namely, a specific AI technique is employed to generate a sequence of operations understandable by the control system of a robot which is to perform a semi-automatic surgical task. According to this technique, a planner is implemented to translate the "natural" language of the surgeon into the robotic sequence that should be executed by the robot. A robotic simulator has been implemented in order to test the planned sequence in a virtual environment. The planned sequence is then to be input to the medical robotic system, which will execute the surgical operation. The work described in this paper features a high level of originality, since no similar applications of AI to medical robotics could be found in the scientific literature.