In 2023, 16.53 million surgeries were performed in German hospitals. An important prerequisite for this is the supply of sterile surgical instruments. The cost-intensive surgical instruments must be cleaned, sterilized, packed, and returned to the surgical process in reprocessing units for medical devices. Many manual steps are required to clean, disinfect, test, care for, sterilize, and pack the surgical instruments. This previously purely manual process is very cost-intensive and usually takes place
in late or night shifts due to the operation schedules. The handling of contaminated surgical instruments by humans is also a source of danger for employees.In this process, the surgical instruments, which are partially delivered disorderly in trays, are picked up by employees, prepared for the disinfection process (e.g. by opening scissors and clamps) and placed in a target tray in an orderly manner. The prepared surgical instruments are partly manually cleaned of coarse impurities and then disinfected in a washer-disinfector. Hereafter, the surgical instruments are prepared for their next use in the operating theatres, including sterilization and packing. The aim of the research project is to support the handling of surgical instruments, in particular contaminated instruments, with a robotic system, and to reduce the workload of medical staff by increasing the degree of automation. The aim is to achieve a cooperative solution with the involvement of humans to take account of the complexity of today’s sterile supply.
An interactive robot cell is to be developed and set up for the test setup, which enables test series based on the existing preliminary developments and the Jarvis tools. A safety concept is to be developed and implemented for the robot cell that enables safe human robot interaction in accordance with the relevant safety standards. Non-contact protective devices (laser scanners, light barriers, radar sensors) are to be used to fulfill the criterion of speed and separation monitoring (SSM – EN ISO 10218-2025).
The surgical instruments recognized and gripped by use of an image processing system are opened to achieve the best possible disinfection result and placed in trays for disinfection. The robots use adaptive path planning to achieve optimum and flexible loading of the containers. In addition, an interactive operating concept is to be implemented, and the acceptance of the
system documented in an employee survey. Cooperation between humans and robots is a key factor in ensuring that the system is sufficiently robust due to the large variety of different surgical instruments.
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The contaminated surgical instruments, which are delivered partly unsorted, are to be picked up and separated by the robot. Gripping and separating the many different surgical instruments is a central component of the project. The robotic gripping system must be flexible enough to be able to grip the surgical instruments even if they are not precisely localized, but also gentle enough to avoid damaging the cost-intensive surgical instruments. Gripping and recognizing medical instruments is a major technical challenge, as there are many
thousands of different surgical instruments of varying sizes on the market. Surgical instruments are made of flexible materials that complicate the separation process.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement nº 101135708. The dissemination of results herein reflects only the author’s view, and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
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