Human-Inspired Robotics Lab » ROBOPuppet for Tele-nursing Robotic System

Advisor

Jane Li (zli11@wpi.edu)

Assistant Professor with Robotics Engineering and Mechanical Engineering

Academic Year: 2017-2018

Major: RBE, ME

Project Goal

Design and build a Precise Positioning Unit to enable a tele-nursing robot to performance tasks of fine motor skills
Investigate the finger-hand-arm coordination and propose control strategies to coordinate the macro- and micro-structures of a robotic manipulator

Project Description

Telenursing robot

During outbreaks of contagious diseases, healthcare workers are at high risk for infection due to routine interaction with patients, handling of contaminated materials, and challenges associated with safely removing protective gear. This poses an opportunity for the use of remote-controlled robots that could perform common nursing duties inside hazardous clinical areas, thereby minimizing the exposure of healthcare workers to contagions and other biohazards. Therefore, we developed a Tele-Robotic Intelligent Nursing Assistant (TRINA), which consists of a mobile manipulator robot, a human operator’s console, and operator assistance algorithms which automate or partially-automate tedious and error-prone tasks, to perform light/medium duty nursing tasks to attend patients with highly infectious diseases.

ROBOPuppet

Intuitive teleoperation interface improves the robot control efficiency and reduce robot teleoperation learning efforts. This MQP aims to develop a RoboPuppet that can intuitively control the arm motion coordination of a Telerobotic Intelligent Nursing Assistant(TRINA) that involve reaching and grasping. Compared to the original teleoperation interface — which control six degrees of freedom of the robot end-effectors, the RoboPuppet can directly control the arm posture of robot, so that teleoperators can easily understand how their control inputs will be mapped to the tele-nursing robot movements.

003InputDevice_ROBOPuppet02

The Robopuppet project aims to expand upon Duke University’s Robopuppet prototype for TRINA robot. The new prototype can control both robot arms and grippers. In addition to the passive RoboPuppet, we also design a motorized RoboPuppet whcih can hold robot position without user input, and enable an easy robot (dis)engagement in teleoperation.

Project Status

Prototype

A non-motorized (passive) Robopuppet has been developed in order to test the controller design for structural stability and comfort. This design has also been used to test the software used to map the controller input to TRINA. A prototype of this design has been constructed and tested with robot simulation and physical platform.

active_cad

A motorized (active) Robopuppet was designed to maintain the posture consistency of the input device and robot when they are disengaged. The design was improved to be easier to print and assemble. It was also made more spacious to make room for motors. Electrically, the design uses a Teensy Microcontroller and have switched from using potnetiometer joint sensors to using hall effect encoders in order to reduce noise during readings.

Required Skills

Mechanical design (Solidworks), Programming (C/C++, Python), Mechatronics