Vision-based estimation of deformation properties for autonomous soft tissues manipulation

We present a method to estimate the deformability properties of soft tissues employing visual observations, during a representative manipulation task performed with the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK). The preliminary results obtained on a phantom experiment have shown that the proposed method is able to estimate parameters which minimize the gap between the real and the simulated configurations. This work represents a first promising step towards the improvement of simulations realism, to an extent that will make their exploitation into real clinical scenarios possible.