Perceptual Docking for Robotic Control (Equipment Rich Proposal)

保护人类免受危险或安全关键环境的直接暴露一直是机器人技术发展背后的推动力。随着机器人技术和其他相关技术的不断发展，全球的研究人员正在将注意力转向可能是最具挑战性的安全关键环境/人体。在人体周围和体内部署机器人，特别是机器人手术，会带来许多独特而具有挑战性的问题，这些问题来自于复杂且往往不可预测的人体解剖环境。像达芬奇系统这样的主从机器人，通过运动缩放和补偿来体现训练有素的最小通道外科医生的运动，正在获得临床意义。基于MEMS技术的具有传感器和执行器的微型机械也迅速兴起。在机器人技术中自主和操纵技术的二分法下，机器人的智能通常是通过高级抽象和环境建模来预先获取的。然而，对于涉及复杂解剖和大组织变形的手术，这是已知的主要困难。对介入手术机器人施加的监管、道德和法律障碍也导致在追求自主性时，操作员和机器人之间需要紧密集成控制。本课题的目的是研究机器人控制的感知对接新概念。“对接”一词与移动机器人中使用的传统术语的含义不同。它代表了机器人系统感知学习和知识获取的基本范式转变，其中操作员特定的运动和感知/认知行为通过凝视偶然框架在原位吸收。我们假设在MIS手术过程中，眼球跳动和眼球辐辏可用于注意选择和恢复软组织的三维运动和变形。预计该方法还将为有效的人机交互开辟一系列全新的机会。该提案寻求设备和研究资金，用于在帝国理工学院建立一个集成的核心实验设施，以研究与机器人感知对接相关的关键挑战，以及与人机交互、视觉感知和机器学习、人体工程学、运动学和驱动设计、术中图像引导、运动和生物力学建模、组织-仪器交互和机器人控制相关的相关研究问题。来自帝国生物医学工程研究所的配套资金已经获得，该设施预计将大大提高多学科研究能力，促进跨多个不同学科的互动和启动新的研究项目。

The quest for protecting humans from direct exposure to hazardous or safety critical environments has been the driving force behind technological developments in robotics. Whilst robotics and other related technologies continue to grow, researchers across the globe are turning their attention to what is perhaps the most challenging safety critical environment of all / the human body. Deploying robots around and within the human body, particularly for robotic surgery presents a number of unique and challenging problems that arise from the complex and often unpredictable environments that characterise the human anatomy. Master-slave based robots such as the daVinci system, which embodies the movements of trained minimal access surgeons through motion scaling and compensation, are gaining clinical significance. Micro-machines possessing sensors and actuators based on the MEMS technology are also rapidly emerging. Under the dichotomy of autonomous and manipulator technologies in robotics, intelligence of the robot is typically pre-acquired through high-level abstraction and environment modelling. For procedures that involve complex anatomy and large tissue deformation, however, this is known to create major difficulties. The regulatory, ethical and legal barriers imposed on interventional surgical robots also give rise to the need of a tightly integrated control between the operator and the robot when autonomy is being pursued. The aim of this project is to research into a new concept of perceptual docking for robotic control. The word docking is different in meaning to the conventional term used in mobile robots. It represents a fundamental paradigm shift of perceptual learning and knowledge acquisition for robotic systems in that operator specific motor and perceptual/cognitive behaviour is assimilated in situ through a gaze contingent framework. We hypothesise that saccadic eye movements and ocular vergence can be used for attention selection and recovering 3D motion and deformation of the soft tissue during MIS procedures. It is expected that the method will also open up a range of completely new opportunities for effective human-machine interaction. This proposal seeks equipment and research funding for establishing an integrated core experimental facility at Imperial College for investigating key challenges related to perceptual docking in robotics and allied research issues related to human-machine interaction, visual perception and machine learning, ergonomics, kinematics and actuation design, intra-operative image guidance, motion and biomechanical modelling, tissue-instrument interaction, and robotic control. Matching funding from the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial has already been secured, and the facility is expected to greatly enhance the multidisciplinary research capacity and facilitate the interaction and initiation of new research programmes across a number of different disciplines.