Recent Updates

| Jul. 30th |We presented our work on IEEE_CYBER 2019 !!! See our work on Proceedings of 9th IEEE International Conference on CYBER Technology in Automation, Control and Intelligent Systems.

|May.17th|Nominated for FYP Competition hold by Hong Kong X Foundation as Top5 Final Year Projects in 2019!!!

|May.16th|We attended the annual dinner of IMECHE and were awarded with Best student design award!!!

|Apr. 30th| Awarded 2019 IMechE Best Student Design Award as the winning team!

|Apr. 30th| We showcased our project on Haking Wong Podium (HW 4/F) at the 1st Engineering InnoShow. Click to see project poster and video made for this carnival! Thank you all for coming over supporting us and thanks for all the inspiration and discussion!!!

|Apr.23rd | Paper Submission to IEEE_CYBER 2019 was accepted!

|Apr. 12th| Nominated for 2019 IMechE Best Student Design Award as Top4 Design Projects among local universities in Hong Kong!

|Mar. 21st| Nominated for 1st Engineering Inno-Show at HKU as Top7 Final Year Projects in the Faculty of Engineering!

|Mar. 20th| Nominated for Global Grand Challenges Summit 2019 as Top3 innovative Projects in the Faculty of Engineering, HKU!

|Mar. 1st | Nominated for FYP Competition hold by Hong Kong X Foundation as Top40 Final Year Projects among local universities in Hong Kong!

Group Members

Background

With a previously developed Tendon-driven 5 D-o-F Robotic Manipulator, a new version of prototype with expanded capabilities and specified functions has been developed to get closer to practical applications. We want to investigate possible improvements on structural design and control approaches with higher precision to improve the quality of the human robot interaction and the efficiency of the dental surgeries. However, multiple problems have made this project rather challenging... [More]

Main Features:

• Dentist hand motion is captured by the robotic system operator.

• Master-slave control is implemented through a embedded C++ program in Haptic Device [the master controller] cooperating with Arduino Mega 2560 [the slave controller]

For system demo, please see [Master-slave control Demo].

Major Deliverables

• A Miniaturized 6-Degree-of-Freedom Robotic Manipulator with Tendon-Driven Mechanism

• A Dentist Console for Teleoperation

• A Set of Dental Hand Tools integrated into the system as End Effector

• An academic paper published on Proceedings of 9th IEEE International Conference on CYBER Technology in Automation, Control and Intelligent Systems (Full text available online, click to view)

“A Compact Asymmetrical Manipulator for Robotic Dentistry” Yufu Tao^#, Tianyi Zhang^#, Wenyutian Xu^#, Ho-Yin Tsang, Jing Li, Zheng Wang^* (# co-first author, * corresponding author)

Methodology

• Actuation: steel tendons were used as the actuators of robotic arm, so that motors could be detached from the manipulator structure and arranged somewhere outside the manipulator

• Bionic configuration: the link lengths and joint angle range were designed that were similar to human arm, which is asymmetric, in order to maximize its workspace to cover a real human oral cavity [See Workspace Simulation Here]

• Control scheme: a haptic device was applied as signal input equipment with a customized API; inverse kinematics algorithm in C++ was solved by analytic method in the master control program; Arduino Mega 2560 works as the slave computer to actuate the digital servo motors and feedback to the master computer

• Prototyping: 3D-printing was utilized to build most of the components; two carrying heavy load were ordered from external manufacturer, made with aluminum 7075