Telesurgery systems integrate multimodal communication and robotic technologies to enable surgical procedures to be performed from remote locations. They allow human surgeons to intuitively control laparoscopic instruments and to navigate within the human body. In this paper, we present selected topics on multimodal interaction in the context of telesurgery applications. These are results from the collaborative research project SFB 453 on ldquoHigh-Fidelity Telepresence and Teleactionrdquo which is funded by the German Research Foundation in the larger Munich area. The focus in this paper is on multimodal information processing and communication including simulation of surgical targets in the human body. Furthermore, we present an overview of our advanced multimodal telesurgery demonstrators that provide a comprehensive platform for our collaborative telepresence research.

The term scaffolding, with respect to human education, was first coined in the 1970ies, although the basic concept originates back to the 1930ies. The main idea is to formalize the superior knowledge of a teacher in a certain way to generate support for a trainee. In practice, this concept can be implemented as concrete as a cloze, which assists pupils in learning a foreign language, or it might be as abstract as a social environment, which facilitates learning of specific tasks. This paper introduces a novel approach towards robotic learning by means of such a scaffolding framework. In this case, the scaffolding is constituted by abstract patterns, which facilitate the structuring and segmentation of information during "Learning by Demonstration". The methodology was applied to a real-world scenario of robot-assisted surgery.

A popular method for an easy and also flexible programming of robots is learning by demonstration. An intelligent controller learns a task from several examples carried out by an experienced user. Afterwards, the task can be adapted to new, formerly unknown environments. One particular challenge arising with this technique is generalization of demonstrations in order to get a generic description of the task. In this paper a new methodology for solving this problem is proposed. The main part of the algorithm exploits principles known from fluid dynamics.