ALTAIR research projects

accurobas PROJECT

Accurate Robot Assistant

Timing

From 1 October 2006
To 30 Septembre 2009

The main objective of the project is to develop an innovative and universal robotic assistant system to support a human in dextrous manipulation. For this reason we address methods to increase accuracy for lightweight compliant robotic systems during surgical procedures with human interaction. The approach focuses on adaptive control by exhibiting rich sensory-motor skills and multi-sensory measurement to distinctly increase the system accuracy.

To handle a complex working field a robot system needs a detailed description of its environment. A natural environment is usually fuzzy and continuously changing. Thus it is a major task within this project to find a way to model such environments with sufficient precision as far as possible. This has an impact on planning a task since the model might be strongly incomplete. Available plan descriptions fail in this case. Therefore it is crucial to include a method to describe uncertainties in the planning.

An advanced and light-weight robot arm which exploits a redundant structure is one component of the proposed architecture. This allows null-space motion enabling the robot’s joints to be reconfigured while the position and orientation of the instrument remains unchanged. Basically, the advanced robot arm includes a complex sensor system and its control devices, that is suitable for a wide range of humanoid operations and especially complex surgical procedures. The system is based on an open and modular architecture. For real operations an arrangement of at least three arms is necessary. Furthermore, the redundancy in the sensory system is necessary to provide a collision avoiding arm control which leads to a more flexible OR setup. As the robot is light-weight it can be easily mounted or removed by user during an operation. As highly demanding demonstration activities we will cope with laser osteotomy and palpation.

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