FF-SRL: High Performance GPU-Based Surgical Simulation For Robot Learning

Abstract: Robotic surgery is a rapidly developing field that can greatly benefit from the automation of surgical tasks. However, training techniques such as Reinforcement Learning (RL) require a high number of task repetitions, which are generally unsafe and impractical to perform on real surgical systems. This stresses the need for simulated surgical environments, which are not only realistic, but also computationally efficient and scalable. We introduce FF-SRL (Fast and Flexible Surgical Reinforcement Learning), a high-performance learning environment for robotic surgery. In FF-SRL both physics simulation and RL policy training reside entirely on a single GPU. This avoids typical bottlenecks associated with data transfer between the CPU and GPU, leading to accelerated learning rates. Our results show that FF-SRL reduces the training time of a complex tissue manipulation task by an order of magnitude, down to a couple of minutes, compared to a common CPU/GPU simulator. Such speed-up may facilitate the experimentation with RL techniques and contribute to the development of new generation of surgical systems. To this end, we make our code publicly available to the community.