Duality-Based Optimization of Occlusion Avoidance for Active Optical Navigation System in Robotic Orthopedic Surgeries

Abstract

In robotic orthopedic surgery, the optical tracking system (OTS) is typically placed in a fixed location. In surgery, the OTS’s line of sight is likely to be blocked. This will interrupt the navigation and affect surgical safety. To solve this occlusion problem, an RGB-D camera is used to detect possible occluders and a navigation robot is utilized to actively adjust the OTS viewpoint before occlusion occurs. To guarantee the applicability, the occluder is enveloped using a convex polytope, and a two-phase optimization method is proposed based on duality of convex optimization. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified via simulations and experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed method can avoid occlusion between the OTS and the occluder, and the targets are located near the center of the measurement volume. This active navigation guarantees the continuity of intraoperative navigation, and thus helps to improve the safety in robotic orthopedic surgery.