Team Members: Nathan Bornfreund, Rick Franc, Steven Landis, Willy Tu

TrueVision Alcon's Ease of Use Upgrades

TrueVision Alcon (TVA) has developed a robotic stereoscopic digital microscope that uses a Universal Robotics arm. The microscope is designed for use in Ophthalmic surgery. The TVA's microscope aids surgeons in correcting and improving a patient's vision through improve digital 3D surgical visualization. However, because a surgery room can be hectic, both surgeons and nurses can become distracted during the operation of the robotic arm. This may inadvertently result in the robotic arm colliding with a person, object, or worse the patient.

Object Detection and Collision Avoidance

The robotic arm provides lots of functionality like autonomously moving from one position to another during surgery and returning to a storage position once the surgery is completed. This leads to a few areas of improvement.

Our capstone project aims to increase ease of use and improve safety by utilizing distance sensors on the arm and the head to prevent the arm from running into objects.

This object detection seamlessly integrates with existing functionality by creating virtual barriers that stop the arm movement before they hit objects in assisted-drive and autonomous mode while warning the operator of the cause.