Robotic surgery is one of the most appealing fields of modern robotics. With over 3 decades history, more than 3.800 systems installed worldwide and over 600.000 robot-assisted interventions conducted per year, the field of robotic surgery is considered well-established. Despite these impressive figures and increasing popularity in research labs all over the world, the list of technological advances that made it into the operating room (OR) during this last decade is fairly limited. Long expected techniques such as 3D reconstruction, motion compensation, virtual guidance, haptic feedback, under study in many labs all over the planet did not make their appearance into the market yet.

The EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF), held once every two years, is the largest interdisciplinary science event in Europe. It brings together over 4 000 leading thinkers, innovators, policy makers, journalists and educators from all over the world to discuss current and future breakthroughs in science. The 8th edition of ESOF took place in Toulouse, France, from 9 till 14 July 2018.

The SMARTsurg team completed the Market analysis and Exploitation in a very dynamic market environment.

POLIMI Near Lab, along with Altair Robotics Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Verona, Italy & Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia – Genova, Italy, through EL.I.S.A.(ELectric Impedance Sensing for Surgical Applications Impedance Sensing for Surgical Applications) project are the finalist of the international competition for academia and industry Surgical Robot Challenge 2018. EL.I.S.A.'s work is supported by SMARTsurg and ARS H2020 projects.

Since the last newsletter, the Consortium partners have worked to set up the functional view of the SMARTsurg system’s architecture and the requirements and specifications of the system and the Head Mounted Display (HMD).

The latest achievements are detailed in the present newsletter.

Zoe Doulgeri and Theodora Kastritsi presented the following paper “On the Stability of Robot Kinesthetic Guidance in the Presence of Active Constraints" at 2018 European Control Conference (ECC 18).