Surgical Gym: A high-performance GPU-based platform for surgical robot learning

<img src="media/mainfigure.jpg" width="80%" height="80%"/>

As the field of surgery progresses, one of its greatest advancements is the incorporation of robotic assistance. Surgical robots, operated by surgeons from a control station, have enabled less invasive surgical procedures with reduced effect by hand tremors. Although robots assist in over a million surgical operations annually, their operation remains human-dependent, lacking task-autonomy. Greater autonomy in surgical robots promises increased efficiency, reduced surgeon fatigue, and more minimally-invasive procedures. Recent applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for control strategies indicate a potential for automated surgery. Training robotic systems through reinforcement learning has been recently made easiser through the use of GPU-based physics simulators, accessing magnitudes more data than their CPU counterparts. Toward this, we introduce Surgical Gym: an open-source platform optimized for GPU capabilities which runs up to 7000x faster than previous surgical simulators.**

Accepted as an ICRA 2024 paper 🎉, please drop by!

About this repository

This repository contains Surgical Robotic Learning tasks that can be run with the latest release of Isaac Sim. Reinforcement Learning (RL) examples are trained using PPO from rl_games library and examples are built on top of Isaac Sim's omni.isaac.core and omni.isaac.gym frameworks. The environment design structure and some of the README instructions inherit from OmniIsaacGymEnvs.

If you find Surgical Gym useful in your work please cite the following source:

Schmidgall, Samuel, Krieger, Axel, and Eshraghian, Jason. "Surgical Gym: A high-performance GPU-based platform for reinforcement learning with surgical robots." arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.04676 (2023).

@article{schmidgall2023surgical,
  title={Surgical Gym: A high-performance GPU-based platform for reinforcement learning with surgical robots},
  author={Schmidgall, Samuel and Krieger, Axel and Eshraghian, Jason},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.04676},
  year={2023}
}

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Table of contents

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• Environments
• Installation
• Running trainings and examples
  • Loading trained models
  • Configuration and command line arguments
  • Hydra Notes
  • Training with Multiple GPUs
• Some code you can copy and paste

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Environments

The da Vinci System

The da Vinci Surgical System is a robotic surgical system designed to facilitate complex surgery through a set of multiple end-effectors that have interchangable attachments.

The system operates through an interface with the Master Tool Manipulator (MTM), which serves as the control center for the surgeon to direct surgical actions. Through the MTM's handles or joysticks, the surgeon's movements are captured and translated into corresponding motions of the Patient Side Manipulators (PSMs), which are attachments responsible for gripping tissue. These PSMs carry out the movements dictated by the surgeon via the MTM, mimicking the surgeon's hand motions, allowing for very accurate and less invasive operations. The PSMs are flexible, multi-jointed instruments capable of holding and manipulating tissue, adjusting to the unique anatomy and requirements of each procedure.

Patient Side Manipulator (PSM)

<img src="media/psm_target_reach.gif" width="500" height="250"/>

A third component of the da Vinci system is the Endoscopic Camera Manipulator (ECM). The ECM is another robotic arm attachment that holds and controls the movement of a stereo endoscope, a special camera that provides a high-definition, three-dimensional view of the surgical field. This allows the surgeon, from the control console, to have a detailed and magnified view of the area being operated on, significantly improving precision and control during the surgical procedure.

Endoscopic Camera Manipulator (ECM)

<img src="media/ecm_target_reach.gif" width="500" height="250"/>

Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR)

The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) is a robot designed at Children's National Hosptial to perform laparoscopic surgery autonomously. The STAR robot has been used for a variety of autonomous surgical procedures, most notably, the first autonomous laparoscopic surgery for intestinal anastomosis (reconnection of two tubular structures such as blood vessels or intestines). The STAR performed the procedure in four different animals, producing better results than humans executing the same procedure.

<img src="media/STAR_track.gif" width="400" height="250"/>

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Installation

[Step 1]

Follow the Isaac Sim documentation to install the latest Isaac Sim release.

Examples in this repository rely on features from the most recent Isaac Sim release. Please make sure to update any existing Isaac Sim build to the latest release version, 2022.2.1, to ensure examples work as expected.

[Step 2]

Once installed, this repository can be used as a python module, SurgicalGym, with the python executable provided from the Isaac Sim installation.

To install SurgicalGym, first clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/SamuelSchmidgall/SurgicalGym.git

Once cloned, locate the python executable in Isaac Sim. By default, this should be python.sh. We will refer to this path as PYTHON_PATH.

To set a PYTHON_PATH variable in the terminal that links to the python executable, we can run a command that resembles the following. Make sure to update the paths to your local path.

For Linux: alias PYTHON_PATH=~/.local/share/ov/pkg/isaac_sim-*/python.sh
For Windows: doskey PYTHON_PATH=C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\ov\pkg\isaac_sim-*\python.bat $*
For IsaacSim Docker: alias PYTHON_PATH=/isaac-sim/python.sh

[Step 3]

Install SurgicalGym as a python module for PYTHON_PATH:

PYTHON_PATH -m pip install -e .

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Running trainings and examples

As the first step we are going to make sure your visualization works and your libraries were installed properly. To do this, we will just run random behavior.

PYTHON_PATH scripts/random_policy.py task=STAR

You should see the STAR robot shaking around. If so you're ready to start training!

Note: all commands should be executed from the location SurgicalGym/surgicalgym.

To train your first policy, run:

PYTHON_PATH scripts/rlgames_train.py task=STAR

You should see an Isaac Sim window pop up. Once Isaac Sim initialization completes, the ECM target reaching scene will be constructed and simulation will start running automatically. The process will terminate once training finishes.

To achieve maximum performance, you can launch training in headless mode as follows:

PYTHON_PATH scripts/rlgames_train.py task=STAR headless=True

A Note on the Startup Time of the Simulation

Some of the examples could take a few minutes to load because the startup time scales based on the number of environments. The startup time will continually be optimized in future releases of Isaac Gym (and hence Surgical Gym).

Loading trained models

Checkpoints are saved in the folder runs/EXPERIMENT_NAME/nn where EXPERIMENT_NAME defaults to the task name, but can also be overridden via the experiment argument.

To load a trained checkpoint and continue training, use the checkpoint argument:

PYTHON_PATH scripts/rlgames_train.py task=STAR checkpoint=runs/STAR/nn/STAR.pth

To load a trained checkpoint and only perform inference (no training), pass test=True as an argument, along with the checkpoint name. To avoid rendering overhead, you may also want to run with fewer environments using num_envs=64:

PYTHON_PATH scripts/rlgames_train.py task=STAR checkpoint=runs/STAR/nn/STAR.pth test=True num_envs=64

When running with a pre-trained checkpoint for the first time, we will automatically download the checkpoint file to surgicalgym/checkpoints. For subsequent runs, we will re-use the file that has already been downloaded, and will not overwrite existing checkpoints with the same name in the checkpoints folder.

Configuration and command line arguments

We use Hydra to manage the config.

Common arguments for the training scripts are:

• task=TASK - Selects which task to use. Any of @PSM, @ECM, @STAR (these correspond to the config for each environment in the folder surgicalgym/cfg/task)
• train=TRAIN - Selects which training config to use. Will automatically default to the correct config for the environment (ie. <TASK>PPO).
• num_envs=NUM_ENVS - Selects the number of environments to use (overriding the default number of environments set in the task config).
• seed=SEED - Sets a seed value for randomization, and overrides the default seed in the task config
• pipeline=PIPELINE - Which API pipeline to use. Defaults to gpu, can also set to cpu. When using the gpu pipeline, all data stays on the GPU. When using the cpu pipeline, simulation can run on either CPU or GPU, depending on the sim_device setting, but a copy of the data is always made on the CPU at ever