Robotic control of flexible devices can enhance and simplify many medical procedures. We present a method for controlling a tendon-driven continuum manipulator by means of specifying the shape configuration. The basis for control is a linear beam configuration model that transforms beam configuration to tendon displacement by modeling internal loads of the compliant system. An essential aspect of this model is the inclusion of both the mechanical and geometrical coupling among serial articulating sections. Important capabilities of this model are the general forward kinematics and the decoupled inverse kinematics that allow for independent control of multiple sections. Tracking results are presented for a cardiac catheter with two articulating sections.

Rigid robotic manipulators employ traditional sensors such as encoders or potentiometers to measure joint angles and determine end-effector position. Manipulators that are flexible, however, introduce motions that are much more difficult to measure. This is especially true for continuum manipulators that articulate by means of material compliance. In this paper, we present a vision based system for quantifying the 3-D shape of a flexible manipulator in real-time. The sensor system is validated for accuracy with known point measurements and for precision by estimating a known 3-D shape. We present two applications of the validated system relating to the open-loop control of a tendon driven continuum manipulator. In the first application, we present a new continuum manipulator model and use the sensor to quantify 3-D performance. In the second application, we use the shape sensor system for model parameter estimation in the absence of tendon tension information.

Continuum robotic manipulators articulate due to their inherent compliance. Tendon actuation leads to compression of the manipulator, extension of the actuators, and is limited by the practical constraint that tendons cannot support compression. In light of these observations, we present a new linear model for transforming desired beam configuration to tendon displacements andviceversa. We begin from first principles in solid mechanics by analyzing the effects of geometrically nonlinear tendon loads. These loads act both distally at the termination point and proximally along the conduit contact interface. The resulting model simplifies to a linear system including only the bending and axial modes of the manipulator as well as the actuator compliance. The model is then manipulated to form a concise mapping from beam configuration-space parameters tonredundant tendon displacements via the internal loads and strains experienced by the system. We demonstrate the utility of this model by implementing an optimal feasible controller. The controller regulates axial strain to a constant value while guaranteeing positive tendon forces and minimizing their magnitudes over a range of articulations. The mechanics-based model from this study provides insight as well as performance gains for this increasingly ubiquitous class of manipulators.

We describe a set of tools for retail analytics based on a combination of video understanding and transaction-log. Tools are provided for loss prevention (returns fraud and cashier fraud), store operations (customer counting) and merchandising (display effectiveness). Results are presented on returns fraud and customer counting.

Pervasive sensor based systems are transforming Information Technology systems from being transactional in nature to being observational in nature. Observational systems are inherently distributed and capture information at a much finer grain of space and time. Enabling and building such systems also poses many technology challenges, extracting information from sensor signals, indexing and searching sensor meta-data, data mining and scalability. In this paper we use S3: the IBM smart surveillance system as an example of an observational system to explore several of these issues through real world deployment examples.