Background

Introduction

Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Automation have become the backbone of the modern development, and researchers are more willingly biased on solving real-world problems. Among them Robotics is one of the famous areas of development and today more industrial and domestic applications are readily available. There are so many types of fixed and mobile robots. There are some robots which have been developed in the medical sector for various purposes. Design and development of a hand gesture controlled soft robot manipulator for medical applications is a novel methodology of developing a medical robot which is capable of gesture controlled soft gripping. The main concentration of this project is the robotics in the medical industry. There are few types of robots which are already developed in the medical industry for various purposes. Through this project a novel methodology of developing a medical robot will be addressed. The role of the development will simultaneously address the increasing safety in collaboration with motivating health sector workers against a mortal viral flue like Ebola, in a plague environment. Lowering of disinfection cost, increased labor capacity and tele-presence would be added benefits that could be generated from this application.

The role of technology in today's world

One of the main disadvantages in Robotics applications is the requirement of expertise to operate the robot. This project will be addressed on eliminating such factors to increase the efficiency and applicability of robots in the medical industry. Among many available types of robots, bilateral systems are widely applicable and famous. There are so many master designs that are readily available to support bilateral systems. Among them, the Joystick (Remote Control), Electromyography, Voice Control, Haptic (Mechanical and Touch Sensitive), Gesture (Hand Gesture, Body Gesture and Eye Gaze) and BCI (Brain Control Interface) stand out prominently.

A research study exists to illustrate the competitiveness of available master designs for assessing the applicability in bilateral system design for an epidemic environment. A literature survey of International research publications for bilateral medical systems for the last few decades was performed to reveal the applicability, controllability (in operation), complexity (of the device), response, reliability and safety of the available master designs. Remote Controlling and Electromyography based technologies are found to be the oldest and established techniques and Haptic is in the middle stage. These conventional systems consist their own disadvantages and control issues. To overcome those issues with the emerging of vision attentive systems the gesture based designs were invented and today it has become widely applicable and well known in research. Also BCI and Voice Control based techniques are in research level and rapidly developing. The assessment of these systems is performed towards a designing of a bilateral system for an epidemic environment which is cost effective, reliable, repetitive and operator skill independent. It is found with the present technology, Gesture based controlling systems are more likely to satisfy the design requirements than other conventional and modern systems and will be widely applicable within next few decades by overcoming its minor issues.

Contributions to the new technology

This research study provides the design techniques, methodologies to integrate the master, slave and communication between two sides and also the development of the soft robotic. The most important features in such a  system are as follows. Convenient HMI (Human Machine Interface) in master side, reduced time delay in Tele-presence and goal oriented design of slave side. Soft robot provides opportunity to bridge the gap between machines and people.

Comparing to hard-bodied robots, soft robots have bodies made out of truly soft and extensible mate­rials such as  elastomers which can be deformed and absorb much of the energy. This type of materials silicon and rubber /elastomers have facilities of sensing, power storage, actuation and computation, therefore algorithms can be derived in order for  the soft robot to deliver the desired behaviour because it allows a major advancement in the degree of it’s freedom.

This project mainly pertains to design and fabrication of the soft robot , and intergration of it with the manipulator type robot arm with a soft robot gripper mechanism controlled by Hand Gestures

Objectives

  1. Introduce an application of the development of a Hand Gesture Controlled Soft Robot Manipulator. 
  2. Design & Development of a Soft Robotics actuating mechanism.
  3. Design & Development of a Pneumatics Controlling mechanism.
  4. Design & Development of a Hand Gesture imitating mechanism for the robot manipulator and the Soft gripping mechanism.