A Review of Smart Materials in Tactile Actuators for Information Delivery

As the largest organ in the human body, the skin provides the important sensory channel for humans to receive external stimulations based on touch. By the information perceived through touch, people can feel and guess the properties of objects, like weight, temperature, textures, and motion, etc. In fact, those properties are nerve stimuli to our brain received by different kinds of receptors in the skin. Mechanical, electrical, and thermal stimuli can stimulate these receptors and cause different information to be conveyed through the nerves. Technologies for actuators to provide mechanical, electrical or thermal stimuli have been developed. These include static or vibrational actuation, electrostatic stimulation, focused ultrasound, and more. Smart materials, such as piezoelectric materials, carbon nanotubes, and shape memory alloys, play important roles in providing actuation for tactile sensation. This paper aims to review the background biological knowledge of human tactile sensing, to give an understanding of how we sense and interact with the world through the sense of touch, as well as the conventional and state-of-the-art technologies of tactile actuators for tactile feedback delivery

Teleoperation of MRI-Compatible Robots with Hybrid Actuation and Haptic Feedback

Image guided surgery (IGS), which has been developing fast recently, benefits significantly from the superior accuracy of robots and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) which is a great soft tissue imaging modality. Teleoperation is especially desired in the MRI because of the highly constrained space inside the closed-bore MRI and the lack of haptic feedback with the fully autonomous robotic systems. It also very well maintains the human in the loop that significantly enhances safety. This dissertation describes the development of teleoperation approaches and implementation on an example system for MRI with details of different key components. The dissertation firstly describes the general teleoperation architecture with modular software and hardware components. The MRI-compatible robot controller, driving technology as well as the robot navigation and control software are introduced. As a crucial step to determine the robot location inside the MRI, two methods of registration and tracking are discussed. The first method utilizes the existing Z shaped fiducial frame design but with a newly developed multi-image registration method which has higher accuracy with a smaller fiducial frame. The second method is a new fiducial design with a cylindrical shaped frame which is especially suitable for registration and tracking for needles. Alongside, a single-image based algorithm is developed to not only reach higher accuracy but also run faster. In addition, performance enhanced fiducial frame is also studied by integrating self-resonant coils. A surgical master-slave teleoperation system for the application of percutaneous interventional procedures under continuous MRI guidance is presented. The slave robot is a piezoelectric-actuated needle insertion robot with fiber optic force sensor integrated. The master robot is a pneumatic-driven haptic device which not only controls the position of the slave robot, but also renders the force associated with needle placement interventions to the surgeon. Both of master and slave robots mechanical design, kinematics, force sensing and feedback technologies are discussed. Force and position tracking results of the master-slave robot are demonstrated to validate the tracking performance of the integrated system. MRI compatibility is evaluated extensively. Teleoperated needle steering is also demonstrated under live MR imaging. A control system of a clinical grade MRI-compatible parallel 4-DOF surgical manipulator for minimally invasive in-bore prostate percutaneous interventions through the patient’s perineum is discussed in the end. The proposed manipulator takes advantage of four sliders actuated by piezoelectric motors and incremental rotary encoders, which are compatible with the MRI environment. Two generations of optical limit switches are designed to provide better safety features for real clinical use. The performance of both generations of the limit switch is tested. MRI guided accuracy and MRI-compatibility of whole robotic system is also evaluated. Two clinical prostate biopsy cases have been conducted with this assistive robot

Modular MRI Guided Device Development System: Development, Validation and Applications

Since the first robotic surgical intervention was performed in 1985 using a PUMA industrial manipulator, development in the field of surgical robotics has been relatively fast paced, despite the tremendous costs involved in developing new robotic interventional devices. This is due to the clear advantages to augmented a clinicians skill and dexterity with the precision and reliability of computer controlled motion. A natural extension of robotic surgical intervention is the integration of image guided interventions, which give the promise of reduced trauma, procedure time and inaccuracies. Despite magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) being one of the most effective imaging modalities for visualizing soft tissue structures within the body, MRI guided surgical robotics has been frustrated by the high magnetic field in the MRI image space and the extreme sensitivity to electromagnetic interference. The primary contributions of this dissertation relate to enabling the use of direct, live MR imaging to guide and assist interventional procedures. These are the two focus areas: creation both of an integrated MRI-guided development platform and of a stereotactic neural intervention system. The integrated series of modules of the development platform represent a significant advancement in the practice of creating MRI guided mechatronic devices, as well as an understanding of design requirements for creating actuated devices to operate within a diagnostic MRI. This knowledge was gained through a systematic approach to understanding, isolating, characterizing, and circumventing difficulties associated with developing MRI-guided interventional systems. These contributions have been validated on the levels of the individual modules, the total development system, and several deployed interventional devices. An overview of this work is presented with a summary of contributions and lessons learned along the way

Design of a Haptic Interface for Medical Applications using Magneto-Rheological Fluid based Actuators

This thesis reports on the design, construction, and evaluation of a prototype two degrees-of-freedom (DOF) haptic interface, which takes advantage of Magneto-Rheological Fluid (MRF) based clutches for actuation. Haptic information provides important cues in teleoperated systems and enables the user to feel the interaction with a remote or virtual environment during teleoperation. The two main objectives in designing a haptic interface are stability and transparency. Indeed, deficiencies in these factors in haptics-enabled telerobotic systems has the introduction of haptics in medical environments where safety and reliability are prime considerations. An actuator with poor dynamics, high inertia, large size, and heavy weight can significantly undermine the stability and transparency of a teleoperated system. In this work, the potential benefits of MRF-based actuators to the field of haptics in medical applications are studied. Devices developed with such fluids are known to possess superior mechanical characteristics over conventional servo systems. These characteristics significantly contribute to improved stability and transparency of haptic devices. This idea is evaluated and verified through both theoretical and experimental points of view. The design of a small-scale MRF-based clutch, suitable for a multi-DOF haptic interface, is discussed and its performance is compared with conventional servo systems. This design is developed into four prototype clutches. In addition, a closed-loop torque control strategy is presented. The feedback signal used in this control scheme comes from the magnetic field acquired from embedded Hall sensors in the clutch. The controller uses this feedback signal to compensate for the nonlinear behavior using an estimated model, based on Artificial Neural Networks. Such a control strategy eliminates the need for torque sensors for providing feedback signals. The performance of the developed design and the effectiveness of the proposed modeling and control techniques are experimentally validated. Next, a 2-DOF haptic interface based on a distributed antagonistic configuration of MRF-based clutches is constructed for a class of medical applications. This device is incorporated in a master-slave teleoperation setup that is used for applications involving needle insertion and soft-tissue palpation. Phantom and in vitro animal tissue were used to assess the performance of the haptic interface. The results show a great potential of MRF-based actuators for integration in haptic devices for medical interventions that require reliable, safe, accurate, highly transparent, and stable force reflection

Medical robots for MRI guided diagnosis and therapy

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provides the capability of imaging tissue with fine resolution and superior soft tissue contrast, when compared with conventional ultrasound and CT imaging, which makes it an important tool for clinicians to perform more accurate diagnosis and image guided therapy. Medical robotic devices combining the high resolution anatomical images with real-time navigation, are ideal for precise and repeatable interventions. Despite these advantages, the MR environment imposes constraints on mechatronic devices operating within it. This thesis presents a study on the design and development of robotic systems for particular MR interventions, in which the issue of testing the MR compatibility of mechatronic components, actuation control, kinematics and workspace analysis, and mechanical and electrical design of the robot have been investigated. Two types of robotic systems have therefore been developed and evaluated along the above aspects. (i) A device for MR guided transrectal prostate biopsy: The system was designed from components which are proven to be MR compatible, actuated by pneumatic motors and ultrasonic motors, and tracked by optical position sensors and ducial markers. Clinical trials have been performed with the device on three patients, and the results reported have demonstrated its capability to perform needle positioning under MR guidance, with a procedure time of around 40mins and with no compromised image quality, which achieved our system speci cations. (ii) Limb positioning devices to facilitate the magic angle effect for diagnosis of tendinous injuries: Two systems were designed particularly for lower and upper limb positioning, which are actuated and tracked by the similar methods as the first device. A group of volunteers were recruited to conduct tests to verify the functionality of the systems. The results demonstrate the clear enhancement of the image quality with an increase in signal intensity up to 24 times in the tendon tissue caused by the magic angle effect, showing the feasibility of the proposed devices to be applied in clinical diagnosis

Kinesthetic Haptics Sensing and Discovery with Bilateral Teleoperation Systems

In the mechanical engineering field of robotics, bilateral teleoperation is a classic but still increasing research topic. In bilateral teleoperation, a human operator moves the master manipulator, and a slave manipulator is controlled to follow the motion of the master in a remote, potentially hostile environment. This dissertation focuses on kinesthetic perception analysis in teleoperation systems. Design of the controllers of the systems is studied as the influential factor of this issue. The controllers that can provide different force tracking capability are compared using the same experimental protocol. A 6 DOF teleoperation system is configured as the system testbed. An innovative master manipulator is developed and a 7 DOF redundant manipulator is used as the slave robot. A singularity avoidance inverse kinematics algorithm is developed to resolve the redundancy of the slave manipulator. An experimental protocol is addressed and three dynamics attributes related to kineshtetic feedback are investigated: weight, center of gravity and inertia. The results support our hypothesis: the controller that can bring a better force feedback can improve the performance in the experiments

Application of ultrasonic motors to MR-compatible haptic interfaces

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery (fMRI) is an imaging technique allowing the observation of brain activity. Haptic interfaces can be used in conjunction with fMRI to stimulate the subject while measuring brain activity. Using robotic stimulation over conventional methods offers repeatability, flexibility and the possibility of logging of different experiment variables. Such system becomes a powerful tool for neuroscience study, diagnostic and rehabilitation. The MR scanner with its high magnetic fields and radio frequency pulses is a harsh environment for a robotic system. Robots that can operate safely and do not induce disturbances in the imaging of the scanner are qualified as MR-compatible. The actuation of these robots is an important issue. Electrical power brought to the actuator represents an important source of interferences with the scanner. Since electrical motors cannot be introduced in the MR room, haptic interfaces are conventionally remotely actuated over a long transmission with the actuators placed outside of the MR room. In particular cases, such as the study of finger motion, small haptic interfaces with limited force ranges are required. Remote actuation methods impose transmission lengths and means that cannot be reduced nor scaled down thus imposing a trade-off between performances and size reduction in these applications. This work investigates an alternative actuator that can achieve high-quality force-interactions with the fingers. The Ultrasonic Motor (USM) is MR-compatible and offers good performances. But it is not well suited for force-feedback and may be hazardous for the users. To address these issues, mechanical solutions are investigated by using an electrical analogy applied to mechanical systems. A novel actuation system using the USM as a power source and a clutch to control the output torque is proposed: the Hybrid USM Clutch Actuator (HUCA). The first prototype validates the different mechanical concepts developed in this work. The second, MR-compatible, integrates a clutch based on electrorheological fluids (ER). MR-compatibility has been validated and performances evaluated. Since the HUCA has the unique property of behaving both like a force source and a velocity source, dedicated control schemes have been developed to implement impedance and admittance force control. These enable the display of stiff walls and the rendering of a wide range of impedances thanks to the overlap of their range of displayable impedances. Compared to the hydrostatic transmission actuation, the HUCA shows higher performances and user safety. Furthermore, the powering through electrical wires allows developments of multi-DOF interfaces

Advancing proxy-based haptic feedback in virtual reality

This thesis advances haptic feedback for Virtual Reality (VR). Our work is guided by Sutherland's 1965 vision of the ultimate display, which calls for VR systems to control the existence of matter. To push towards this vision, we build upon proxy-based haptic feedback, a technique characterized by the use of passive tangible props. The goal of this thesis is to tackle the central drawback of this approach, namely, its inflexibility, which yet hinders it to fulfill the vision of the ultimate display. Guided by four research questions, we first showcase the applicability of proxy-based VR haptics by employing the technique for data exploration. We then extend the VR system's control over users' haptic impressions in three steps. First, we contribute the class of Dynamic Passive Haptic Feedback (DPHF) alongside two novel concepts for conveying kinesthetic properties, like virtual weight and shape, through weight-shifting and drag-changing proxies. Conceptually orthogonal to this, we study how visual-haptic illusions can be leveraged to unnoticeably redirect the user's hand when reaching towards props. Here, we contribute a novel perception-inspired algorithm for Body Warping-based Hand Redirection (HR), an open-source framework for HR, and psychophysical insights. The thesis concludes by proving that the combination of DPHF and HR can outperform the individual techniques in terms of the achievable flexibility of the proxy-based haptic feedback.Diese Arbeit widmet sich haptischem Feedback für Virtual Reality (VR) und ist inspiriert von Sutherlands Vision des ultimativen Displays, welche VR-Systemen die Fähigkeit zuschreibt, Materie kontrollieren zu können. Um dieser Vision näher zu kommen, baut die Arbeit auf dem Konzept proxy-basierter Haptik auf, bei der haptische Eindrücke durch anfassbare Requisiten vermittelt werden. Ziel ist es, diesem Ansatz die für die Realisierung eines ultimativen Displays nötige Flexibilität zu verleihen. Dazu bearbeiten wir vier Forschungsfragen und zeigen zunächst die Anwendbarkeit proxy-basierter Haptik durch den Einsatz der Technik zur Datenexploration. Anschließend untersuchen wir in drei Schritten, wie VR-Systeme mehr Kontrolle über haptische Eindrücke von Nutzern erhalten können. Hierzu stellen wir Dynamic Passive Haptic Feedback (DPHF) vor, sowie zwei Verfahren, die kinästhetische Eindrücke wie virtuelles Gewicht und Form durch Gewichtsverlagerung und Veränderung des Luftwiderstandes von Requisiten vermitteln. Zusätzlich untersuchen wir, wie visuell-haptische Illusionen die Hand des Nutzers beim Greifen nach Requisiten unbemerkt umlenken können. Dabei stellen wir einen neuen Algorithmus zur Body Warping-based Hand Redirection (HR), ein Open-Source-Framework, sowie psychophysische Erkenntnisse vor. Abschließend zeigen wir, dass die Kombination von DPHF und HR proxy-basierte Haptik noch flexibler machen kann, als es die einzelnen Techniken alleine können

Design, Development, and Evaluation of a Teleoperated Master-Slave Surgical System for Breast Biopsy under Continuous MRI Guidance

The goal of this project is to design and develop a teleoperated master-slave surgical system that can potentially assist the physician in performing breast biopsy with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) compatible robotic system. MRI provides superior soft-tissue contrast compared to other imaging modalities such as computed tomography or ultrasound and is used for both diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. The strong magnetic field and the limited space inside the MRI bore, however, restrict direct means of breast biopsy while performing real-time imaging. Therefore, current breast biopsy procedures employ a blind targeting approach based on magnetic resonance (MR) images obtained a priori. Due to possible patient involuntary motion or inaccurate insertion through the registration grid, such approach could lead to tool tip positioning errors thereby affecting diagnostic accuracy and leading to a long and painful process, if repeated procedures are required. Hence, it is desired to develop the aforementioned teleoperation system to take advantages of real-time MR imaging and avoid multiple biopsy needle insertions, improving the procedure accuracy as well as reducing the sampling errors. The design, implementation, and evaluation of the teleoperation system is presented in this dissertation. A MRI-compatible slave robot is implemented, which consists of a 1 degree of freedom (DOF) needle driver, a 3-DOF parallel mechanism, and a 2-DOF X-Y stage. This slave robot is actuated with pneumatic cylinders through long transmission lines except the 1-DOF needle driver is actuated with a piezo motor. Pneumatic actuation through long transmission lines is then investigated using proportional pressure valves and controllers based on sliding mode control are presented. A dedicated master robot is also developed, and the kinematic map between the master and the slave robot is established. The two robots are integrated into a teleoperation system and a graphical user interface is developed to provide visual feedback to the physician. MRI experiment shows that the slave robot is MRI-compatible, and the ex vivo test shows over 85%success rate in targeting with the MRI-compatible robotic system. The success in performing in vivo animal experiments further confirm the potential of further developing the proposed robotic system for clinical applications