Millirobots for High Fidelity Minimally Invasive Surgery

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project addresses new methods to generate collision-free paths for robots that operate in environments that change over time. Typical applications of this research include robot arms mounted on mobile platforms, arms that operate in factory settings, or any other manipulation systems that operate in environments that are either unknown a priori or may change over time. The proposed approach comprises preprocessing and on-line stages. Preprocessing produces a representation of the configuration space that can be easily modified in real-time to account for changes in the environment. A one-dimensional roadmap is constructed for an obstacle-free workspace, and the mapping from workspace cells to nodes and arcs in the roadmap is encoded. In the on-line stage, when the environment changes, this mapping is used to make the appropriate modifications to the roadmap, and plans can be generated by searching the modified roadmap. At the heart of the method is the encoding for the mapping from workspace obstacles to configuration space obstacles. To make the proposed approach truly viable, a major component of the proposed research will focus on robustness and complexity issues. These issues will be addressed by using tools from the fields of image processing, information theory, graph theory, computational geometry, and incremental algorithms.