Robot-Assisted Suturing in Surgical Simulation: A Comparative Analysis Between NVIDIA’s Simulator and an Open Platform

Virtual simulations have served as important tools for designing and testing robotic frameworks in various domains. Increasingly, they have been used to train and experiment in surgical robotics applications. Having seen the success of an open simulation environment for robot-assisted surgical suturing in the Asynchronous Multi-Body Framework (AMBF), we sought to reproduce the surgical suturing environment from AMBF in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, a simulator with impressive visual fidelity and GPU-accelerated computation capabilities. We present a virtual scene for robotic suturing comprising two robotic manipulators, an endoscope, two surgical phantoms and a needle attached to a thread. The thread is modeled using three different techniques. This work also provides interactive manipulation of the virtual scene via haptic input devices using the Robot Operating System interface. Although Isaac Sim possesses impressive and realistic visuals, AMBF outperforms in speed by up to 15 frames per second, depending on the task. AMBF also responded faster than Isaac Sim by approximately 0.1 s when using a haptic input device. In this context, our objective is to provide a comprehensive overview of the capabilities and limitations of NVIDIA Isaac Sim in the surgical robotics challenge relative to AMBF.