Integration of Kinesthetic and Tactile Display: A Modular Design Concept

This paper describes the systematic design of a modular setup for several integrated kinesthetic and cutaneous (tactile) display configurations. The proposed modular integration of a kinesthetic display and several tactile displays in serial configuration provides a versatile experimental setup to explore the integration of the kinesthetic and tactile modality of the human perception. The kinesthetic base display is a hyper-redundant device and sufficiently powerful to carry each of the compact tactile displays. In addition to a detailed description of the partly novel displays, a series of preliminary evaluation experiments is presented

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

An Asynchronous Simulation Framework for Multi-User Interactive Collaboration: Application to Robot-Assisted Surgery

The field of surgery is continually evolving as there is always room for improvement in the post-operative health of the patient as well as the comfort of the Operating Room (OR) team. While the success of surgery is contingent upon the skills of the surgeon and the OR team, the use of specialized robots has shown to improve surgery-related outcomes in some cases. These outcomes are currently measured using a wide variety of metrics that include patient pain and recovery, surgeon’s comfort, duration of the operation and the cost of the procedure. There is a need for additional research to better understand the optimal criteria for benchmarking surgical performance. Presently, surgeons are trained to perform robot-assisted surgeries using interactive simulators. However, in the absence of well-defined performance standards, these simulators focus primarily on the simulation of the operative scene and not the complexities associated with multiple inputs to a real-world surgical procedure. Because interactive simulators are typically designed for specific robots that perform a small number of tasks controlled by a single user, they are inflexible in terms of their portability to different robots and the inclusion of multiple operators (e.g., nurses, medical assistants). Additionally, while most simulators provide high-quality visuals, simplification techniques are often employed to avoid stability issues for physics computation, contact dynamics and multi-manual interaction. This study addresses the limitations of existing simulators by outlining various specifications required to develop techniques that mimic real-world interactions and collaboration. Moreover, this study focuses on the inclusion of distributed control, shared task allocation and assistive feedback -- through machine learning, secondary and tertiary operators -- alongside the primary human operator

Exploration of Reaction Pathways and Chemical Transformation Networks

For the investigation of chemical reaction networks, the identification of all relevant intermediates and elementary reactions is mandatory. Many algorithmic approaches exist that perform explorations efficiently and automatedly. These approaches differ in their application range, the level of completeness of the exploration, as well as the amount of heuristics and human intervention required. Here, we describe and compare the different approaches based on these criteria. Future directions leveraging the strengths of chemical heuristics, human interaction, and physical rigor are discussed.Comment: 48 pages, 4 figure

A field programmable gate array based modular motion control platform

The expectations from motion control systems have been rising day by day. As the systems become more complex, conventional motion control systems can not achieve to meet all the specifications with optimized results. This creates the necessity of fundamental changes in the infrastructure of the system. Field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology enables the reconfiguration of the digital hardware, thus dissolving the necessity of infrastructural changes for minor manipulations in the hardware even if the system is deployed. An FPGA based hardware system shrinks the size of the hardware hence the cost. FPGAs also provide better power ratings for the systems as well as a more reliable system with improved performance. As a trade off, the development is rather more difficult than software based systems, which also affects the research and development time of the overall system. In this paper a level of abstraction is introduced in order to diminish the requirement of advanced hardware description language (HDL) knowledge for implementing motion control systems thoroughly on an FPGA. The intellectual property library consists of synthesizable hardware modules specifically implemented for motion control purposes. Other parts of a motion control system, like user interface and trajectory generation, are implemented as software functions in order to protect the modularity of the system. There are also several external hardware designs for interfacing and driving various types of actuators

Design and Development of a Tele-operated Surgical Simulation Environment

With the introduction of robots into laparoscopic surgery, surgeons have difficulties in selecting the placement of the incisions required to insert the robots instruments into the body and also determine which patients are suitable for robotically assisted surgery. Poor selection of these two items mentioned above can result in a conversion to a more invasive form of surgery during the procedure. This work introduces the design and development of a surgical simulation environment to assist in the research for optimal incision placement and patient selection. The simulator allows importing any serial link robot that was designed in a computer aided modelling package. With minimal added information, the imported robot can be controlled using a multi-degree of freedom user input device. The simulator allows for importing patient geometries along with the robot to allow for the simulation of surgical procedures. A Jacobian transpose algorithm was added onto the simulator in a modular format to control the simulated robots, as well as to allow for other control systems to be created and implemented. Experiments were performed to determine the effects of patient geometry models on rendering speeds. The control system could control the tested robots with a maximum lag time of 15 ms between moving the input device and the simulated robot moving to the correct desired position. The simulator makes importing and controlling robots a simple and intuitive matter, without putting a large restriction on the type of robots to be simulated. The simulator also allows for importing models of a patient, to make real world analysis of a patient possible. Further improvements on the presented simulator include the addition of collision detection and more testing on the control system for stability and response over a larger range of robots