Proto-communication,Social Bonding and Persuasiveness for Minimally Designed Robots Scaffolded by Non-Expert Trainers

豊橋技術科学大

sCAM: An Untethered Insertable Laparoscopic Surgical Camera Robot

Fully insertable robotic imaging devices represent a promising future of minimally invasive laparoscopic vision. Emerging research efforts in this field have resulted in several proof-of-concept prototypes. One common drawback of these designs derives from their clumsy tethering wires which not only cause operational interference but also reduce camera mobility. Meanwhile, these insertable laparoscopic cameras are manipulated without any pose information or haptic feedback, which results in open loop motion control and raises concerns about surgical safety caused by inappropriate use of force.This dissertation proposes, implements, and validates an untethered insertable laparoscopic surgical camera (sCAM) robot. Contributions presented in this work include: (1) feasibility of an untethered fully insertable laparoscopic surgical camera, (2) camera-tissue interaction characterization and force sensing, (3) pose estimation, visualization, and feedback with sCAM, and (4) robotic-assisted closed-loop laparoscopic camera control. Borrowing the principle of spherical motors, camera anchoring and actuation are achieved through transabdominal magnetic coupling in a stator-rotor manner. To avoid the tethering wires, laparoscopic vision and control communication are realized with dedicated wireless links based on onboard power. A non-invasive indirect approach is proposed to provide real-time camera-tissue interaction force measurement, which, assisted by camera-tissue interaction modeling, predicts stress distribution over the tissue surface. Meanwhile, the camera pose is remotely estimated and visualized using complementary filtering based on onboard motion sensing. Facilitated by the force measurement and pose estimation, robotic-assisted closed-loop control has been realized in a double-loop control scheme with shared autonomy between surgeons and the robotic controller.The sCAM has brought robotic laparoscopic imaging one step further toward less invasiveness and more dexterity. Initial ex vivo test results have verified functions of the implemented sCAM design and the proposed force measurement and pose estimation approaches, demonstrating the technical feasibility of a tetherless insertable laparoscopic camera. Robotic-assisted control has shown its potential to free surgeons from low-level intricate camera manipulation workload and improve precision and intuitiveness in laparoscopic imaging

Cooperative Object Transport in Multi-robot Systems:A Review of the State-of-the-Art

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in designing multi-robot systems (hereafter MRSs) to provide cost effective, fault-tolerant and reliable solutions to a variety of automated applications. Here, we review recent advancements in MRSs specifically designed for cooperative object transport, which requires the members of MRSs to coordinate their actions to transport objects from a starting position to a final destination. To achieve cooperative object transport, a wide range of transport, coordination and control strategies have been proposed. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive summary for this relatively heterogeneous and fast-growing body of scientific literature. While distilling the information, we purposefully avoid using hierarchical dichotomies, which have been traditionally used in the field of MRSs. Instead, we employ a coarse-grain approach by classifying each study based on the transport strategy used; pushing-only, grasping and caging. We identify key design constraints that may be shared among these studies despite considerable differences in their design methods. In the end, we discuss several open challenges and possible directions for future work to improve the performance of the current MRSs. Overall, we hope to increase the visibility and accessibility of the excellent studies in the field and provide a framework that helps the reader to navigate through them more effectivelypublishersversionPeer reviewe

Motivating Time as a First Class Entity

In hard real-time applications, programs must not only be functionally correct but must also meet timing constraints. Unfortunately, little work has been done to allow a high-level incorporation of timing constraints into distributed real-time programs. Instead the programmer is required to ensure system timing through a complicated synchronization process or through low-level programming, making it difficult to create and modify programs. In this report, we describe six features that must be integrated into a high level language and underlying support system in order to promote time to a first class position in distributed real-time programming systems: expressibility of time, real-time communication, enforcement of timing constraints, fault tolerance to violations of constraints, ensuring distributed system state consistency in the time domain, and static timing verification. For each feature we describe what is required, what related work had been performed, and why this work does not adequately provide sufficient capabilities for distributed real-time programming. We then briefly outline an integrated approach to provide these six features using a high-level distributed programming language and system tools such as compilers, operating systems, and timing analyzers to enforce and verify timing constraints

Sensitive Calligraphy Robot & Design Review Creation

The calligraphy robot is a proof-of-concept platform for a high precision combined control system with position and force control. The platform is a gantry system and an end-effector with series elastic actuators. PVT control was utilized to achieve smooth curves without noticeable shaking or jagged lines. This design has potential implications for surgical robots. The Cornell Cup competition required design reviews to mimic a professional engineering process. However, there is a lack of helpful guides to critically approaching the creation of a design review. The Cornell Cup reviews are the analytical basis for a study of choices made during creation and the forces that influence those choices which culminated in a handout guide to help other students improve their design reviews