Telerobotic Systems for Medical and Industrial Applications

动机需要非常高水平的精密度和准确度的外科手术任务极大地依赖于外科医生的手部灵巧度和手术技能熟练程度，而目前的工具在一定程度上提高了这一点。具有触觉(触摸)反馈、图像引导、半自动、人工智能、人机协作、机器视觉和人工虚拟夹具等增强功能的远程操作机器人平台可以提供工程和技术解决方案，以提高外科医生进一步突破这些限制的能力。在短期内，这些技术解决方案可以提高医疗保健质量(例如，脑外科手术中肿瘤切除的范围)，为外科医生提供新的工具，以执行否则非常困难的程序，甚至为以前被认为不可能的外科程序打开大门。从长远来看，这些技术解决方案将减少与手术程序相关的时间和成本，并将提供潜在的好处，如更好的患者结果、更高的手术安全性、更高的生活质量和术后患者的恢复时间。目的在机器人触觉遥操作的一些核心领域仍存在一些技术和工程挑战，需要在控制理论、稳定性、鲁棒性、可操作性、多智能体机器人系统、触觉视觉伺服等主要工程理论和方法方面进行基础研究和探索，以便能够提供实用可行的遥操作解决方案。这样的系统应该提供切实的好处，适用于目标应用，并易于外科医生和操作员使用。这可以通过引入工程和科学的创新技术及其在远程机器人系统中的应用来实现。因此，该研究计划提出了一种新的范式，旨在通过最先进的研究提供基本的工程解决方案，以解决与远程机器人和触觉相关的挑战和问题，并提供新颖和智能的控制方法，以促进该领域的知识，朝着医疗和工业应用中此类机器人系统的全球采用迈进。影响本计划中要解决的研究问题是由实际需求驱动的，确保结果将有利于具有实用价值的应用程序。它们将扩大外科医生在非常困难的外科手术环境中的能力，并将提高操作员执行以前高风险或不可能完成的任务的能力。拥有为长期改善医疗服务、治疗、机器人辅助干预和培训新的医疗专业人员提供创新技术解决方案的愿景，将导致医疗质量的提高和成本的降低，同时使加拿大经济多样化，并为加拿大人提供高科技行业的就业机会。

Motivation Surgical tasks requiring a very high level of precision and accuracy are extremely dependent on the hand dexterity and surgical skill proficiency of the surgeons, which are partially enhanced by current tools. Teleoperated robotic platforms with enhancements such as haptic (touch) feedback, image-guidance, semi-automation, artificial intelligence, human-robot collaboration, machine vision, and artificial virtual fixtures can provide engineering and technical solutions to improve surgeons' ability to push the boundaries of these limitations further. In the short term, these technological solutions can improve the quality of healthcare (e.g., the extent of tumor resection in brain surgery), provide novel tools for surgeons to perform procedures that were very hard otherwise, or even open the doors for surgical procedures that were deemed impossible previously. In the long term, these technical solutions will decrease the time and thus costs associated with the surgical procedures and will provide potential benefits such as better patient outcomes, increased surgical safety, and higher quality of life and shorter recovery time for patients after surgery. Objective There are still several technical and engineering challenges in a number of core areas of haptic-enabled teleoperation of robots that need fundamental research and investigation in control theory, stability, robustness, manipulability, multi-agent robotic systems, haptic-visual servoing, and other primary engineering theories and methods, to be able to provide practical and viable telerobotic solutions. Such systems should provide tangible benefits, be suitable for the targeted application, and be easy to use for surgeons and operators. These can be achieved by introducing innovative technologies in engineering and science and their application in telerobotic systems. Accordingly, this research program proposes a new paradigm towards providing fundamental engineering solutions through state-of-the-art research to tackle challenges and issues associated with telerobotics and haptics, and to provide novel and intelligent control methods to advance the knowledge in this field, towards global adoption of such robotic systems in medical and industrial applications. Impact The research problems to be addressed in this program are driven by real needs, ensuring that results would benefit applications with practical value. They will extend the ability of surgeons in challenging milieu of very hard surgical procedures and will increase capability of the operators in performing tasks that were high-risk or impossible before. Having the vision of providing innovative technical solutions for long-term improvement of healthcare delivery, treatment, robot-assisted intervention, and training of new healthcare professionals, will result in improving quality of healthcare and cost reduction, while diversifying the Canadian economy and providing jobs in high-tech industries for Canadians.