Towards trusted autonomous surgical robots

© 2018 IEEE. Throughout the last few decades, a breakthrough took place in the field of autonomous robotics. They have been introduced to perform dangerous, dirty, difficult, and dull tasks, to serve the community. They have been also used to address health-care related tasks, such as enhancing the surgical skills of the surgeons and enabling surgeries in remote areas. This may help to perform operations in remote areas efficiently and in timely manner, with or without human intervention. One of the main advantages is that robots are not affected with human-related problems such as: fatigue or momentary lapses of attention. Thus, they can perform repeated and tedious operations. In this paper, we propose a framework to establish trust in autonomous medical robots based on mutual understanding and transparency in decision making.