Toward Rapid Prototyping of Miniature Capsule Robots

Minimally invasive robotic surgery techniques are becoming popular thanks to their enhanced patient benefits, including shorter recovery time, better cosmetic results and reduced discomforts. Less invasive procedures would be achieved with the use of Medical Capsule Robots (MCRs). These devices are characterized by low power requirements and small dimensions as well as uncompromising safety. MCRs operate wirelessly in abdominal Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) and Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES) or in the Gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The design process of MCRs, however, is expensive and time consuming. A platform for rapid prototyping MCRs is needed so that MCR researchers can reduce development costs and spend more time in studying innovative MCR applications. In this work, we introduce an open source modular platform geared toward rapid prototyping MCRs. To speed up the prototyping process, the MCR is programmed using TinyOS instead of bare-bone C. We present the hardware architecture of the platform, and the motivation for using TinyOS. To show the viability of TinyOS, we present results from an experiment involving sensing, actuation and wireless communication. This work lays the foundation for our future goal of building an integrated design environment for the design, analysis and simulation of MCRs

Web-based Integrated Development Environment for Event-Driven Applications

Event-driven programming is a popular methodology for the development of resource-constrained embedded systems. While it is a natural abstraction for applications that interface with the physical world, the disadvantage is that the control flow of a program is hidden in the maze of event handlers and call-back functions. TinyOS is a representative event-driven operating system, designed for wireless sensor networks, featuring a component-based architecture that promotes code reuse. In this paper, we present a web-based model-driven graphical design environment for TinyOS that visualizes the component hierarchy of an application, and captures its eventbased scheduling mechanism. In contrast with existing visual environments, our representation explicitly captures the control flow of the application through events and commands, which makes it easier to understand the program logic than studying the source code. The design environment supports two-way code generation: mapping the visual representation to TinyOS source code, as well as building visual models from existing sources

Systematic Design of edical Capsule Robots

Medical capsule robots that navigate inside the body as diagnostic and interventional tools are an emerging and challenging research area within medical CPSs. These robots must provide locomotion, sensing, actuation, and communication within severe size, power, and computational constraints. This paper presents the first effort for an open architecture, platform design, software infrastructure, and a supporting modular design environment for medical capsule robots to further this research area

Metamodel Reuse with MOF

International audienceAs model-driven development promotes metamodels as key assets it raises the issue of their reuse throughout a model-driven product line life cycle. One recurrent reuse need occurs when metamodeling integrated multi-language platforms: one construct from one language is integrated to constructs from other languages by generalizing it, making it more expressive. None of the metamodel assembly facilities provided by MOF and UML (import, merge and combine) or others proposed in previous work adequately addresses this need. We thus propose a new reuse and generalize facility for such purpose