This is a video explaining the palpating gripper I have been developing as part of my work on augmenting robotic minimally invasive (keyhole) surgery with haptic (touch) feedback.
The basic premise of the work is that more tactile properties may be determined from an object if it can be actively explored using one or more fingers. To facilitate this sort of exploration inside the body I have been designing a robotic gripper that is simple enough to be manufactured for keyhole surgery but has enough dexterity to replicate some of the exploratory hand motions of a surgeon.
This work has been accepted for publication at IEEE Haptics Symposium 2012.
Wednesday, 14 December 2011
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
PhD Thesis Online
I've finally put my PhD thesis online with open access. The title of the work is: "Robust and Intelligent Control Approaches for Biologically Inspired Motion Generation with an Anthropomorphic Robot Arm".
The work attempts to find ways of modelling human motion patterns mathematically and then getting a robot arm to obey those mathematic rules in a safe and efficient manner. A good chunk of these rules dealt with producing optimal motion (in terms of 'effort') that could also deal with the robot having a imperfect model of its own body (for example, we didn't model the friction in the gearboxes). All the control is done dynamically (in terms of forces and torques) rather than kinematically (in terms of positions and angles). This is more difficult but gives more control over the robot.
The below figure shows one of the early results in the thesis, where the robot's reaching motion (to a target height) is based largely on effort minimisation and ends up appearing very human. The person in the image is only included for comparison, the robot isn't copying him.
You can view or download the full pdf of the thesis here.
The work attempts to find ways of modelling human motion patterns mathematically and then getting a robot arm to obey those mathematic rules in a safe and efficient manner. A good chunk of these rules dealt with producing optimal motion (in terms of 'effort') that could also deal with the robot having a imperfect model of its own body (for example, we didn't model the friction in the gearboxes). All the control is done dynamically (in terms of forces and torques) rather than kinematically (in terms of positions and angles). This is more difficult but gives more control over the robot.
The below figure shows one of the early results in the thesis, where the robot's reaching motion (to a target height) is based largely on effort minimisation and ends up appearing very human. The person in the image is only included for comparison, the robot isn't copying him.
You can view or download the full pdf of the thesis here.
Wednesday, 23 November 2011
Paper Accepted for Haptic Symposium
My research on a novel miniture robot gripper for tele-operated palpation has been accepted for presentation at Haptics Symposium 2012 in Vancouver.
Palpation is defined in the Oxford English dictionary as "[to] examine (a part of the body) by touch, especially for medical purposes".
My submitted paper involved a bio-inspired approach to electromechanical device design, where the finger motions of surgeons were studied during exploratory scenarios in order to set a number of functional objectives for the device. The other design requirements were set by the proposed application of minimally invasive surgery.
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Palpation is defined in the Oxford English dictionary as "[to] examine (a part of the body) by touch, especially for medical purposes".
My submitted paper involved a bio-inspired approach to electromechanical device design, where the finger motions of surgeons were studied during exploratory scenarios in order to set a number of functional objectives for the device. The other design requirements were set by the proposed application of minimally invasive surgery.
Friday, 28 October 2011
Dada Robot - First Drawing
Many years ago I salvaged an ex-industrial robot that was being thrown out of the University research lab I was working in. A crime for sure but I could see why they were getting rid of it. The robot was a collection of metal and motors but little more. No electronics, no power supply, no software. A mere shell of a machine.
Over the last few years I've been nuturing it back to health, building and coding replacement hardware and software. I had to take a break from working on dada (as the robot is known) for quite some time, as I got very stuck on a tricky stepper motor control problem. Recently though I discovered an excellent Arduino library (Accelstepper) that more or less solved the problem for me. Enough so at least that a few weeks ago I got the robot to draw its first picture, which is rather abstract. Here's the sped-up video:
More on dada, including a scanned image of the final picture, and explanation of what is going on, can be found on dada's own site http://dada.soulwire.co.uk/
The dada project is a collaboration with Justin Windle.
Over the last few years I've been nuturing it back to health, building and coding replacement hardware and software. I had to take a break from working on dada (as the robot is known) for quite some time, as I got very stuck on a tricky stepper motor control problem. Recently though I discovered an excellent Arduino library (Accelstepper) that more or less solved the problem for me. Enough so at least that a few weeks ago I got the robot to draw its first picture, which is rather abstract. Here's the sped-up video:
More on dada, including a scanned image of the final picture, and explanation of what is going on, can be found on dada's own site http://dada.soulwire.co.uk/
The dada project is a collaboration with Justin Windle.
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
Puppet Place Open Day Video
Here's a video from a recent 'open doors' day in Puppet Place, the studio I rent with other members of the creative technology collective RustySquid.
A bunch of the stuff on show was from people who work in the studio, though we had a good number of guest pieces too. You can find out more about each piece by clicking on it in the video.
Keen eyes will spot the Haptic Lotus at 0:42, which was present for hands on demos. Because I couldn't blindfold people or black out the lights as usual (far too much stuff to trip over) I had people follow me around while holding the Lotus. It fully blossomed when they approached the tea and cake stand. Pretty much everyone, robots included, likes tea and cake.
A bunch of the stuff on show was from people who work in the studio, though we had a good number of guest pieces too. You can find out more about each piece by clicking on it in the video.
Keen eyes will spot the Haptic Lotus at 0:42, which was present for hands on demos. Because I couldn't blindfold people or black out the lights as usual (far too much stuff to trip over) I had people follow me around while holding the Lotus. It fully blossomed when they approached the tea and cake stand. Pretty much everyone, robots included, likes tea and cake.
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
Writing for Guerilla Science
Here's a link to an article I wrote for Guerilla Science on the haptic lotus installation I did with them at Secret Garden Party this summer.
The article will be stored in their archives here: http://guerillascience.co.uk/archives/2490
Thursday, 22 September 2011
UbiComp 2011 Best Paper Prize
This week a paper on the Haptic Lotus was awarded Best Paper prize at the prestigious Ubiquitous Computing conference (UbiComp) in China. There were over 300 papers presented at the conference so we (the authors) are very happy about this.
The paper "Haptic Reassurance in the Pitch Black for an Immersive Theatre Experience" was presented by my collaborator Janet van der Linden of the Open University. It may be downloaded here.
Here is a video of the talk by Janet.
The paper "Haptic Reassurance in the Pitch Black for an Immersive Theatre Experience" was presented by my collaborator Janet van der Linden of the Open University. It may be downloaded here.
Here is a video of the talk by Janet.
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