Watchdog circuitry of a surgical robot arm

Abstract

A surgical robot with a surgical robot arm and a surgical robot arm controller. The surgical robot arm has a set of joints and a joint controller. The joint controller is configured to drive a joint of the set of joints. The surgical robot arm controller has a processor and watchdog circuitry. The processor is configured to send joint driving signals to the joint controller on a communication link. The watchdog circuitry is configured to: receive sequence values from the processor; determine whether each received sequence value matches a next expected value of a predetermined sequence; and if the received sequence value does not match the next expected value of the predetermined sequence, disable the communication link between the processor and the joint controller.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.