Needle insertion is pervasive in almost all medical activities. The development of compact, lightweight automated tools for needle insertion with the reliability of an expert needle-inserting nurse could significantly reduce the risk to both civilian and military patients. Such tools could open the door to many advanced concepts for future medicine by being an ¿enabler¿ of one of the first actions in almost all procedures. The purpose of this paper is to discuss two force-based devices that address the needle insertion problem: a compliance-sensing system that mimics the nurse palpation to determine the best needle insertion point across a vein, and a needle insertion device that uses force-based profiles during insertion to achieve successful catheterization without puncturing the vein back wall. The methodologies and implementation approaches for the two enabling systems are described. Experimental data obtained with training pads and phantom arms are presented and discussed.

The loss of fingers and hands severely limits career and lifestyle options for the amputee. Unfortunately, while there have been strides made in advancements of upper arm and leg prosthetics, the state of the art in prosthetic hands is lagging far behind. Options are generally limited to claw like devices that provide limited gripping capacity. The overall objective of this paper is to demonstrate a path towards a low-cost prosthetic hand with multiple articulated fingers and a thumb that rivals the human hand in terms of weight, size, dexterity, range of motion, force carrying capacity and speed. We begin with a description of the functional requirements for a human hand. When comparing requirements with actuation technologies, the fluid power approach has the potential to realize a prosthetic hand that rivals a human hand in size, strength and dexterity. We introduce a new actuation technology, mesofluidics, that focuses on miniaturization of fluid power to the meso-scale (mm to cm). As a novel demonstration of the potential for this technology, we describe a proof-of-principle mesofluidic finger that has intrinsic actuation and control (actuators and control valves within the volume of the finger). This finger weighs 63 grams, is sized to the 50thpercentile male finger, has a total of 25 mechanical parts and is capable of providing 10 kg (22 lbs) of pinch force.

In typical teleoperated surgeries, skilled staff are still necessary in the remote surgical room to change manipulator tooling and to manage surgical supply delivery and removal. This paper describes the development of a nurse robot to provide automated support to a teleoperated surgical manipulator system in environments where the presence of skilled surgical support staff may not be practical. The tools must be inserted precisely into a compliant manipulator in a timely manner, and the supplies are diverse in nature. To support experimental investigations and evaluations, a seven degrees-of-freedom commercially available manipulator was selected. The design of novel end-effectors, tool grasping and supply holding features, and tool auto-loading systems for optimum surgical tool changing and supply delivery in minimum time is presented. A novel approach for calibration of the nurse robot among compliant and rigid subsystems and for managing forces during subsystem interaction is described and experimental results using this force management approach are presented. Overall experimental performance data for the nurse robot system during tool changing and supply delivery tasks is also presented to illustrate the feasibility of performing these functions in a remote medical or trauma care-assist cell.

While there is a wide range of actuation technologies, none currently rivals the overall performance (power density, bandwidth, stress, stroke) of conventional hydraulic actuation [1]. It is well known in the actuation community that the power-to-weight ratios and the power-to-volume ratios of hydraulic actuators are, respectively, around 5 times and 10 to 20 times larger than comparable electric motors. Due to fundamental limitations in the magnetic flux density in the supporting structures and limitations in the heat transfer out of electric actuators, significant changes in these ratios are not likely in the near future [2]. Thermal limitations associated with electric motors do not apply to hydraulic actuators since the hydraulic fluid cools and lubricates the system. However, with all of these virtues, hydraulic actuators have serious practical implementation problems. Typically, servo-based hydraulic actuators are leaky and have generally poor energy efficiencies. This work addresses a new type of electric actuator that combines the best of both the electric and hydraulic mediums.

The decrease in manpower and increase in material handling needs on many naval vessels provides the motivation to explore the modeling and control of naval robotic and robotic assistive devices. This paper presents a simple methodology to symbolically compute the dynamic equations of motion of a serial link manipulation system operating on the moving deck of a ship. First we provide background information that quantifies the motion of the ship, both in terms of frequency and amplitude. We then formulate the motion of the ship in terms of homogeneous transforms. Likewise, the kinematics of a manipulator is considered as a serial extension of the ship motion. We then show how to use these transforms to formulate the kinetic and potential energy of the arm moving on a ship. As a demonstration, we consider two examples: a one degree-of-freedom system experiencing three sea states operating in a plane to verify the methodology and a 3 degree of freedom system experiencing all six degrees of ship motion to illustrate the ease of computation and complexity of the solution. We provide a preliminary comparison between conventional linear control and repetitive learning control (RLC) and show how fixed time delay RLC breaks down due to the varying wave disturbance frequency.

Most of the research related to flexible link manipulators to date has focused on single link, fixed length, single plane of vibration test beds. In addition, actuation has been predominantly based upon electromagnetic motors. Ironically, these elements are rarely found in the existing industrial long reach systems. This paper describes a new hydraulically actuated, long reach manipulator with a flexible prismatic link at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Focus is directed towards both modeling and control of hydraulic actuators as well as flexible links that have variable natural frequencies.

Addresses two issues associated with the implementation of a hydraulically powered dissimilar master-slave teleoperated system. These issues are the overall system control architecture and the design of robust hydraulic servo controllers for the position control problem. Finally, a discussion of overall system performance on an actual teleoperated system is presented. (Schilling's Titan II hydraulic manipulators are the slave manipulators and the master manipulators are from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory-developed Advanced Servo Manipulator).

Ways a stiffness controller can be used to control a teleoperator system with a redundant degree-of-freedom (DOF) slave manipulator and a dissimilar master are examined. No path planning is allowed because of the uncertainty of the environment and computational limitations. The proposed controller was implemented on the 7-DOF Center for Engineering Systems Advanced Research Manipulator slave manipulator with a 6-DOF Kraft master manipulator. The overall performance of this scheme and future directions are discussed.>

The authors show how to design a joint controller for a telerobotic system when joint torque sensors are available. Other sensors, such as actuator position, actuator velocity, joint position, and joint velocity, are assumed to be accessible; however, the results will also be useful when only partial measurements are available. The controller presented can be applied to either mode of operation of a manipulator (i.e. teleoperation or robotic). Mechanical manipulators with high levels of friction are assumed. The results are applied to a telerobotic system built for NASA. Very high levels of friction have been reduced using high-gain feedback while avoiding limit cycles.>