Case Study: German Aerospace Center (DLR) advances robotic surgery research with RTI Connext DDS

Minimally Invasive Robotic Surgery (MIRS) with the DLR Mirosurge

The German Aerospace Center (DLR), through its MiroLab research lab, is developing minimally invasive robotic surgery to help surgeons operate with greater precision, especially in highly demanding procedures like surgery on a beating heart. The challenge was to restore hand-eye coordination and haptic “feel” in a remote teleoperation setup while keeping the system modular enough for rapid research prototyping and a future path toward medical certification. RTI provided the connectivity framework with RTI Connext DDS.

RTI Connext DDS was implemented to connect the three MIRO robots, the endoscope, and the surgeon and technician interfaces, enabling synchronized, deterministic distributed control at rates between 1 KHz and 3 KHz. This gave DLR the flexible, decoupled architecture needed for rapid experimentation and expansion to more robots with minimal additional communication development, while RTI Connext Micro and RTI Connext DDS Cert provided a clearer route toward safety-certified medical deployment.

German Aerospace Center (DLR)

Stefan Jörg

Research Engineer