High-quality, affordable surgical care should be widely available, yet availability often depends largely on environmental factors. For example, the infrastructure for expensive equipment and expert surgeons may not exist in remote environments, including rural hospitals, battlefronts and space flights. While there has been significant research into the development of large-scale robot- assisted minimally invasive surgical systems, commercial systems and trained surgeons are both expensive as well as limited resources. This project focuses on developing lower-cost, handheld robotic devices that combine the strengths of direct human-operators with the precision and dexterity of robots. These handheld robots will have broad impact in the medical field, by improving the health, well-being, and standard of care for underserved patients. In addition, the fundamental principles of human-in-the-loop design and control discovered through this research will help guide the creation of new devices in other areas of healthcare, manufacturing, and defense. This project aims to broaden participation in engineering through outreach programs, public lab tours, the development of a new hands-on course, and the mentoring of underrepresented students.
In order to create handheld robotic devices, this project will take a human-focused approach to design and control through three main technical components. First, a model of the handheld device that incorporates the dynamics of the human hand, along with fatigue models for various muscle groups in the hands and arms will be developed. These models will help inform the device design. Second, the efficiency and accuracy of different strategies for both steering the instrument, as well as for mapping hand movement to instrument movement, will be evaluated. Third, flexible strain sensors will be incorporated for measuring task-critical force information that will then be displayed to the operator using haptic feedback in the form of directional cues. The optimal feedback parameters, along with the effectiveness of haptic feedback in improving task performance, will be measured. By developing a human-focused design approach, this work will expand our understanding of human-robot interactions for classes of robots beyond telerobots and can provide guiding principles for creating new robots with applications beyond surgery and healthcare.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
