Telerobotic Systems for Medical and Industrial Applications

需要非常高水平的精确度和准确度的手术任务非常依赖于外科医生的手部灵活性和手术技能熟练度，这部分地通过当前的工具来增强。具有诸如触觉（触摸）反馈、图像引导、半自动化、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的质量（例如，脑外科手术中肿瘤切除的程度），为外科医生提供了新的工具来执行非常困难的手术，甚至为以前认为不可能的手术打开了大门。从长远来看，这些技术解决方案将减少与外科手术相关的时间和成本，并将提供潜在的益处，例如更好的患者结局，增加手术安全性，以及更高的生活质量和更短的术后恢复时间。 目的基于触觉的机器人遥操作在许多核心领域仍存在一些技术和工程上的挑战，需要对控制理论、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进行基础研究和调查，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，适合于目标应用，并且易于外科医生和操作者使用。这些可以通过在工程和科学领域引入创新技术及其在遥控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，通过最先进的研究提供基本的工程解决方案，以解决与遥控机器人和触觉相关的挑战和问题，并提供新颖的智能控制方法来推进这一领域的知识，在医疗和工业应用中全球采用这种机器人系统。 影响在这个程序中要解决的研究问题是由真实的需求驱动，确保结果将有利于具有实用价值的应用。它们将扩展外科医生在非常困难的外科手术的挑战性环境中的能力，并将提高操作者执行以前高风险或不可能的任务的能力。我们的愿景是提供创新的技术解决方案，以长期改善医疗保健服务，治疗，机器人辅助干预和培训新的医疗保健专业人员，这将导致提高医疗保健质量和降低成本，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.