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Main Authors: Liu, Yihao, Ku, Yu-Chun, Zhang, Jiaming, Ding, Hao, Kazanzides, Peter, Armand, Mehran
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05646
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author Liu, Yihao
Ku, Yu-Chun
Zhang, Jiaming
Ding, Hao
Kazanzides, Peter
Armand, Mehran
author_facet Liu, Yihao
Ku, Yu-Chun
Zhang, Jiaming
Ding, Hao
Kazanzides, Peter
Armand, Mehran
contents Data scarcity has long been an issue in the robot learning community. Particularly, in safety-critical domains like surgical applications, obtaining high-quality data can be especially difficult. It poses challenges to researchers seeking to exploit recent advancements in reinforcement learning and imitation learning, which have greatly improved generalizability and enabled robots to conduct tasks autonomously. We introduce dARt Vinci, a scalable data collection platform for robot learning in surgical settings. The system uses Augmented Reality (AR) hand tracking and a high-fidelity physics engine to capture subtle maneuvers in primitive surgical tasks: By eliminating the need for a physical robot setup and providing flexibility in terms of time, space, and hardware resources-such as multiview sensors and actuators-specialized simulation is a viable alternative. At the same time, AR allows the robot data collection to be more egocentric, supported by its body tracking and content overlaying capabilities. Our user study confirms the proposed system's efficiency and usability, where we use widely-used primitive tasks for training teleoperation with da Vinci surgical robots. Data throughput improves across all tasks compared to real robot settings by 41% on average. The total experiment time is reduced by an average of 10%. The temporal demand in the task load survey is improved. These gains are statistically significant. Additionally, the collected data is over 400 times smaller in size, requiring far less storage while achieving double the frequency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_05646
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle dARt Vinci: Egocentric Data Collection for Surgical Robot Learning at Scale
Liu, Yihao
Ku, Yu-Chun
Zhang, Jiaming
Ding, Hao
Kazanzides, Peter
Armand, Mehran
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Data scarcity has long been an issue in the robot learning community. Particularly, in safety-critical domains like surgical applications, obtaining high-quality data can be especially difficult. It poses challenges to researchers seeking to exploit recent advancements in reinforcement learning and imitation learning, which have greatly improved generalizability and enabled robots to conduct tasks autonomously. We introduce dARt Vinci, a scalable data collection platform for robot learning in surgical settings. The system uses Augmented Reality (AR) hand tracking and a high-fidelity physics engine to capture subtle maneuvers in primitive surgical tasks: By eliminating the need for a physical robot setup and providing flexibility in terms of time, space, and hardware resources-such as multiview sensors and actuators-specialized simulation is a viable alternative. At the same time, AR allows the robot data collection to be more egocentric, supported by its body tracking and content overlaying capabilities. Our user study confirms the proposed system's efficiency and usability, where we use widely-used primitive tasks for training teleoperation with da Vinci surgical robots. Data throughput improves across all tasks compared to real robot settings by 41% on average. The total experiment time is reduced by an average of 10%. The temporal demand in the task load survey is improved. These gains are statistically significant. Additionally, the collected data is over 400 times smaller in size, requiring far less storage while achieving double the frequency.
title dARt Vinci: Egocentric Data Collection for Surgical Robot Learning at Scale
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05646