Section: Software

Development work: Medical robotics platforms

Participants : Fabien Spindler [correspondant] , Alexandre Krupa.

This tesbed is of primary interest for researches and experiments concerning ultrasound visual servoing applied to positioning or tracking tasks described in Section  6.4 .

This platform is composed by a six degrees of freedom Adept Viper S850 arm (see Fig. 3 ). This year we bought a new Adept Viper S650 arm to replace our eight year old Hippocrate medical arm designed by the Sinters company. Ultrasound probes connected either to a SonoSite 180 Plus or an Ultrasonix SonixTouch imaging system can be mounted on a force torque sensor attached to each robot end-effector.

We plan to exploit the two Viper robots for demonstrating needle insersion under ultrasound imaging to precisely guide the needle toward a target while optimizing its visibility (see Section  6.4.4 ).

Note that four papers published by Lagadic in 2012 enclose experimental results obtained with this platform.

Figure 3. Lagadic medical robotics platforms. On the right Viper S850 robot arm equiped with a SonixTouch 3D ultrasound probe. On the left Viper S650 equipped with a tool changer that allows to attach a classical camera.