The Surgical Assistant Workstation (SAW) modular software framework provides integrated support
for robotic devices, imaging sensors, and a visualization pipeline for rapid prototyping of telesurgical
research systems. Subsystems of a telesurgical system, such as the master and slave robots and the visualization
engine, form a distributed environment that requires an efficient inter-process communication
(IPC) mechanism. This paper describes the extension of the component-based framework provided by
the cisst libraries, on which the SAW depends, from a multi-threaded (local) to a multi-process (networked)
environment. The current implementation uses the Internet Communication Engine (ICE) middleware
package, but the design does not depend on ICE and can accomodate other middleware choices.
A telesurgical robot system based on the da Vinci hardware platform is used as a test case, with a research
application that requires coordination between the left and right robot arms (a bimanual knot tying task).
Performance measurements on this platform indicate minimal overhead due to the networking.