The Virtual Path: The Domain Model for the Design of the MIRO Surgical Robotic System

Abstract

The MIRO Platform, designed at DLR, is a highly integrated and compliant mechatronic robotic system for minimally invasive surgery. This publication presents the “Virtual Path,” a domain model in the sense of Domain Driven Design, which provides a formal guideline for all designers of the MIRO Platform to obtain a deterministic implementation without the necessity of a monolithic framework. Using Hardware-Software Co-Design methods, the roles of the basic component types of a robotic system were formally defined. The result is a set of design idioms that provide a solution for three main issues when mapping those components to a distributed heterogeneous mechatronic architecture: synchronization, scheduling, and error handling.