Epidural anesthesia, despite being a relatively common medical procedure, remains quite demanding in terms of skills as it is mostly blind and thus heavily reliant on the haptic sensations. Although some training support solutions exist, anesthetists consider them mostly inefficient or impractical. A few attempts at creating a simulator for this particular procedure exist but each one lacks one of the important requirements of the procedure. This article introduces a haptic simulator featuring a more complete and realistic simulation of the procedure than we could observe in existing simulators. The simulator is composed of a generic electrical haptic interface coupled with a pneumatic cylinder.

Haptic simulators are used in many education domains to improve hands-on training performance. Many of these simulators are used in the medical domain, where it is particularly important to be trained, guided by an expert. However, the majority of haptic hands-on training devices are usable by only one user at the same time, either the trainer or the trainee. Dual-user approaches have enhanced this situation by allowing both trainer and trainee to use the same simulator to introduce guided training into the simulation. In this paper, we introduce a multi-trainee architecture that expands further a former dual-user hands-on haptic training solution designed according to an energetic approach. This system will permit several trainees to be involved in the same simulation at the same time, guided by a single trainer. It paves the way to the multi-trainee hands-on training on haptic simulators.

Epidural anaesthesia is a medical gesture commonly performed by an anaesthesiologist. However, it remains one of the most difficult gestures to master for medical students. Given the lack of sufficiently realistic training devices available for future physicians, we propose a new haptic simulator which reproduces the haptic sensations felt by anaesthesiologists when performing this kind of operation. The originality of this simulator is the coupling of a Geomagic Touch®device with a pneumatic cylinder to reproduce the “Loss of Resistance” phenomenon which helps the physician to control the needle depth. In this paper, we introduce the parametric 3D model of the region of interest and the control laws used jointly. Even though this device could not reproduce the right level of forces required in this type of anaesthesia, an anaesthesiologist involved in the project gave positive feedback about its haptic tissue rendering.

This paper introduces a new controller for dual-user training systems, designed by way of an energy based approach. Dual-user training systems are useful for supervised hands-on training when a trainer shows the right gestures to a trainee and where the forces to apply on the tools are difficult to dose. An energy shared control (ESC) based architecture is proposed, based on an intrinsically passive authority sharing mechanism which is enhanced to provide a full force feedback to both users. As this enhancement may violate the natural passivity of the system, a passivity controller is introduced. A task based comparative study with two other dual-user schemes (Complementary Linear Combination (CLC) and Masters Correspondence with Environment Transfer (MECT) from is conducted, which reveals analogous performances. Real-time experiments demonstrate good tracking performances.

A pneumatic actuator with solenoid valves is a discontinuous-input system because each valve can be either in on or off state. For such an actuator, this paper proposes a sliding-mode control scheme based on an averaged continuous-input equivalent model for the open-loop system. The averaged model is obtained from the nonlinear dynamics of the open-loop discontinuous-input system undergoing pulse-width-modulation (PWM) at the input (i.e., valve open/close action). The PWM duty cycle will be regarded as a continuous input to the proposed averaged model, and thus generated by the proposed sliding-mode controller. By adjusting the PWM duty cycle, the controller switches between seven modes of operation of the open-loop system in order to select the ones with necessary and sufficient amounts of drive energy to achieve position tracking. We will show that this results in reduced position error and valve switching activity for the actuator. The proposed control scheme is experimentally used in the position control of a pneumatic actuator and the results are presented.

For a pneumatic teleoperation system, sliding-mode control laws ensuring both transparency and low switching (open/close) activity of the valves are developed. Each pneumatic actuator has four on/off valves, thus sixteen possible combinations (“operating modes”) for the valves exist but only seven of them are both functional and unique. While previous works have focused on three-mode sliding-based position control of one pneumatic actuator, this paper develops seven-mode sliding-based bilateral control of a teleoperation system comprising a pair of pneumatic actuators. The proposed bilateral sliding control scheme is experimentally validated on a pair of actuators arranged in a force-position teleoperation architecture. The results demonstrate that leveraging the additional modes of operation leads to more efficient and smooth control of the system.

In this paper, we show that the integration of a new MES within an existing manufacturing system requires to appeal to a method enabling the modeling of interactions between hardware and software components, the modeling of their behavior and their use by production staff. We show how SysML is a language fitting this need and we illustrate this discussion on a real sample.

In the context of E-Learning, remote hands-on training has become an insisting need as in traditional learning, especially in scientific and technical disciplines. Electronic Laboratories (ELabs) have been growing for the last few years. But till now, exchanging learning scenarios of ELabs is still difficult as existing scenarios (elaborated by means of standard ELearning authoring tools) are restricted to specific apparatuses, which prevents instructors from reusing or exchanging scenarios. Actually, LIESP team started in 2002 a research aiming to provide a framework which helps towards exchanging ELab learning scenarios when they fit to similar apparatuses (same functions, maybe not the same hardware). Meanwhile, LIMOS team focused on a design process to automate PLC code generation to help to design and generate programs for industrial discrete systems.

For a few years, Electronic Laboratories (ELabs: computer-aided local laboratories as much as distant and virtual ones) have been growing in the E-Learning panorama. Meanwhile, in major E-Learning activities, learning scenarios are nowadays written in a standard way (SCORM, IMS-LD) to be used by standard Learning Management Systems. The use of such scenarios in ELab trainings is appearing just now. However such scenarios are dedicated to one specifi ELab and cannot be easily used for other similar ELabs. Since 2002, we work on the integration of learning scenarios into ELab platforms to help to re-use learning scenarios corresponding to similar apparatuses. Paper describing the global corresponding life-cycle have already been published. This paper introduces a tool which intervenes in the first step of this life-cycle: the learning scenario design process. It should help authors to design "generic" ELab learning scenarios, available for functionally compliant ELabs. This tool also aims at pre-testing such learning scenarios on a virtual apparatus to check scenario-apparatus communication.

Long distance teleoperation over asynchronous transmission links makes many classical teleoperation schemes unstable. The use of this kind of media involves varying transmission delays that may become prohibitive even at short distance. However, they are standardized, cheap and widespread over the planet. The paper presents our latest works on the improvement of teleoperation loops, by providing a low-level architecture which permits the use of classical teleoperation controls over asynchronous digital links.