Projects

Robots for Real World Interaction (BOOT)

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Neurotechnologies for functional rehabilitation (Grenoble-Neurotech)

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Cosserat Rod Theory for Slender Robots (COSSEROOTS)

Robotics is today experiencing a paradigmatic revolution. The “stiffer is better” of our rigid robots is challenged by a new generation of robots with controlled deformations of finite amplitudes. This is the case of trunk-robots in soft robotics, continuum robots in medical robotics or hyper-redundant eel/nake-robots in bio-inspired robotics. In contrast to the rigid elder sibling, this novel robotics lacks a solid and unified corpus of modelling tools for control. Building on a novel parametrization of the Cosserat theory of rods, COSSEROOTS aims at producing for the first time a comprehensive and unified corpus of methods and models devoted to the control of slender robots with actuated large deformations. Beyond modelling, COSSEROOTS will use these novel modelling tools to address challenging control problems in the fields of soft, medical, and bio-inspired robotics.

Continuum Robots in Clinical Applications: Prototypes and Simulation Environment

Medical Interventions (surgery, interventional radiology, radiotherapy) can provide a significant boost for progress in terms of patient-specific optimal planning and performance. To fulfill patient’s demand for Quality, Senior Operators demand to see beyond the immediately visible, to be assisted in their real-time vital decisions and to accede to enhanced dexterity, while junior operators request to “learn to fly” before being left alone, and Public Health Authorities and companies require demonstration of the Medical Benefit of innovations.

Computer Assisted Medical Interventions: A new perspective through the CAMI LABEX

The Computer Assisted Medical Interventions (CAMI) LABEX strategic vision is that an integrated approach of medical interventions will result in a breakthrough in terms of quality of medical interventions, demonstrated in terms of medical benefits and degree of penetration of CAMI technology in routine clinical practice.

The Mission of CAMI LABEX

CAMI LABEX proposes :

• to offer the operator the possibility to see beyond the immediately visible by innovative fusion of multimodal data obtained by novel or classical sensors.

• to offer assistance to real-time decision-making through high-level planning and monitoring of the intervention.

• to offer the operator a new dimension in intervention performance with miniaturized robots and solutions for augmented dexterity.

• to reduce the learning curve by offering User-centered learning strategies exploiting the educational potentialities of CAMI technologies

• to develop and validate an adapted methodology for the demonstration of the Medical Benefit of CAMI techniques.

Enhanced, Augmented Dexterity

We are also interested in developing a continuum robotic platform by building millimeter-size robot prototypes for demonstration and investigations, as well as a simulation environment. The goal is to gather scientific researchers, clinical partners, and industrial partners together in a unique framework for know-how and know-why exchange. The Continuum Robotic Assisted Medical Interventions ToolKit (CoRAMI-TK) will be part of the ECCAMI (Excellence Center for Computer Assisted Medical Interventions) platform and integrated in CamiTK (Computer Assisted Medical Intervention Tool Kit) framework.

Control of Millimeter-size Continuum Robots for Medical Applications:

My postdoctoral research was essentially focused on feedback control of miniaturized continuum robots (diameters below 10 mm). At this small scale, continuum robots are suitable for a wide range of medical applications where anatomy constraints, narrow paths, and safety requirements prevent standard rigid-linked robots to access and operate. Thus, I am interested in improving functionalities of medical robots by increasing the number of continuum arms accessing from a single endoscope's working channels. This concerns the integration of two collaborative Concentric Tube Continuum Robots and their automatic motion coordination. To this aim, the collaborative continuum arms were kinematically modeled as a single structure interacting with a virtual object. This approach allows to take advantage of the resulting redundancy in the combined system. Therefore, a suitable redundancy resolution allowed to automatically control the relative distance between the collaborative arms' end-effectors while following complex trajectories in 3D space [RAL-2018a].

Another research topic is the description of continuum robots' behavior for optimization purposes and/or for control strategies. We assessed the performances of two of the most widely used kinematic models, namely beam mechanics (BM) and Cosserat rod (CR) theory, both qualitatively and quantitatively. These approaches were considered in modeling a magnetic extensible tendon-actuated robot, with three segments. Our findings include a slight preference for CR in contrast to BM in terms of accuracy: shape error and Euclidean distance error at every segment end. Potential applications include design optimization and kinematic analysis. However, BM showed much higher update rate (up to 1000 times faster than CR model), which is more suitable for real-time applications, such as feedback control [RAL-2019].

I also contributed to improving motion generation abilities of Tendon-Actuated Continuum Robots (TACR). While the standard TACR are actuated by tendons (generally 3) routed parallel to the backbone (robot's center-line), the studied approach consisted of routing an additional tendon helically. The benefits of the additional actuation tendon were quantified in terms of reachable workspace and motion generation abilities. We showed that the workspace can be increased up to 400% and that twisting motion can be provided, added to the regular bending [IROS-2017, video included on IEEE Xplore].

My publications at the Laboratory for Continuum Robotics are listed here: Publications-LKR.