We discussed with Dr. Zohny last week on the details and focus of our project. The goal of our project is to create a surgical training system. With making this system, we need to convert vector movement from surgical videos into robotic hand movements. These movements will guide the hand of a trainee while they watch the video. The idea is for the trainee to stick their hands in the machine and allow the robot to guide their hands with the surgical motion occurring in the video. Our goal is to program at least fifteen seconds of motion.
The group's weak point is in robotics. Therefore, we have reached out to Professor Mell and have made an appointment to meet with him next Tuesday. In addition, we have contacted Dr. Jack Engberg for more guidance. If you have any suggestions or resources for our project, please let us know.
Weekly report #2
I am contacting you in regards to our team’s progress on our senior design project. This past week we met with Professor Mell and Dr. Jack Engsberg to further our understanding of the project scope and robotics. Professor Mell was able to provide our team with multiple resources to learn basic robotics. Our surgical training device will incorporate a robotic actuator and this was our first step in determining what we might need and what it might look like. He also agreed to meet with us further if we had any more questions. Our meeting with Dr. Engsberg also went well. We were able to identify him as a valuable resource that will provide our group with vectors from motion-capture cameras. These vectors will be the input into our device. We plan to start meeting on a weekly basis starting in late September. He will also let us use his lab as a work-space once we begin building our device.
In addition to these meetings, we have also began to research current surgical training devices on the market. A few that we found interesting were the Mimic dV Trainer, and the Surgical Science Lapsim Haptic System. We will continue to research more products and learn more about the market.
The next steps of our project include brainstorming potential solutions as well as finishing our project scope. At this time I have a question about the electronic notebooks.
Weekly Report #3
This week our group worked to complete our project proposal as well as started on our proposal presentation. Our project proposal seeks to address all the necessary components of the rubric. The proposal was split evenly between us, with each of us focusing on different aspects. Rose focused on the introduction, target populations/environments, markets, and team organization/responsibilities. Ramona worked specifically on the introduction, Gantt chart, market situation, and scope. I (Tate) was responsible for the scope, target populations/environment, design specifications, and market situation.Each person reviewed the document, and contributed to each section.This week we also met with Professor Mell to further discuss motors and the feasibility of our project. Ideally, our robotic system will have two modes: one that physically guides the user through the procedure and another that provides resistance as the user moves through the movement. This meeting has confirmed our idea of doing both modes. Finally, our group continued to explore brainstorming ideas with very basic CAD drawings and 3D printed-prototypes. This is simply our attempt to visualize our brainstorming methods. This has helped us compile our design requirements. The CAD drawings will be added to the design notebook shortly.We have no questions at this point. We are excited to finish our brainstorming process and decide upon a design to build!
Weekly Report #4
This week, the team prepared for the preliminary report presentation. Tate was our main presenter and assembled slides for the presentation, and Rose and Ramona gave him feedback and helped finish editing slides while working past technical difficulties as Tate's computer broke down at the beginning of the weekend. All members of the team went to the med school to practice the presentation with the TA Nate. The team arrived early the morning of the presentation to help Tate set up and review last minute details. We then listened to a graded other teams' presentations. We got some good feedback from Dr. Silva and plan to attend his office hours more often to get more feedback from him. We are currently in the process of learning robotics in order to create a draft of a design our prototype.
Weekly Report #5
This week we worked on our website. Rose designed the website while Ramona and Tate provided the edits and pictures. Also, we decided on a name for our device. It will be Impetus Surgical Systems. Impetus means a force or energy with which a body moves. This name is fitting for our project since our robot will move the hands of surgeons. We are still learning about robotics. Our plan is to set meetings with Dr. Engsberg and Professor Mell on our progres.
Weekly Report #6
This week we worked on brainstorming various ideas, which resulted in us meeting twice. Two ideas that we are very excited about include the box device that the user can stick their hands in and have guided by precise motors and sensors as well as a stand-alone glove idea that could operate in a 3D-space. The glove would allow the users to easily see their hands while the box idea would give us the most accurate movements. Both could be adopted to include a virtual reality component. We worked on all these ideas together, but I sketched up the model in Inventor. Ramona also designed us a logo this week that we have included in our design notebooks. We think it accurately depicts the values and product we intend to create. Rose will submit the design notebook today.At this point we do not have any questions, and we are excited to begin our progress report and Pugh Chart. Thanks!
Weekly Report #7
Since we recently received the vector data from Dr. Engsberg, this week we brainstormed the ways we can process the data, in addition to finding ways to integrate the data to the actuators. We will meet again soon to start the programming. We also scheduled an appointment with Dr. Mell for next week to talk about the vectors, because he said he wanted to talk about the data once we got it.
Weekly Report #8
We met this week on Sunday. We started planning for the project in December to finalize our two designs and the parts we needed for both. We also met with Dr. Mell this week to get his input on the next steps for the project. He told we need to decide on what direction we would like to go with the project.
Weekly Report #9
This was an interesting week for our group. We met three separate times to discuss various parts of our assignment. On Monday we spoke with Dr. Silva about our project. Our concern was that the project was a little bit too big for us to handle. He helped us put our project in perspective and identified how we should proceed. Instead of focusing on all the different components at once, Dr. Silva suggested we pick a couple different barriers/components and address those aspects. This helped us narrow down our scope for the upcoming presentation. To follow up our meeting on Monday, the team met on Tuesday to brainstorm various ideas. We started with our two big picture ideas: guiding the hands by moving them and guiding the hands by moving the tool. For each one we listed all the potential barriers to our success. These included finger movement/control, vector transformation, and safety. Then we chose to focus on one of the barriers and come up with multiple different ways to address the problem. This will be the basis of our analysis in the upcoming presentation. In addition, we decided upon the criteria that we are going to use to judge the options for the selected barrier. This will shape our Pugh Chart. Finally,we visited Dr. Engsbergs’ lab and spoke with one of his assistants about the motion capture system they use to make the vector matrix. We left the meeting with video of the surgeons preforming and a much better understanding of how the system works.We will continue to work on vector transformation and reaching out to the correct individuals. The next steps include making our Pugh chart and start prototyping.
Weekly Report #10
This past week, we worked to gather our ideas for the progress report paper. Because the nature of our project is so large, per Dr. Silva's suggestions, we came up with a list of "barriers" that we would have to overcome in the project. After Pugh chart analysis, we selected "wrist control" to attack. From there, we came up with three different methods that could be implemented to control the wrist, including gradient elevation, manipulating magnets, and a puppet idea. We used a Pugh chart to analyze our three ideas and decided to move forward with the puppet idea. To generate movement, we would need to select a type or several types of actuators to use, so we researched as many actuators as we could and found that we wanted to use a combination of piezoelectric actuators and micropositioners.
Together, we wrote our progress report on our findings during several meetings, including a meeting on Sunday and Tuesday, in addition to on our own time over the holiday break. We also sketched out a preliminary final design for controlling the wrist. We came up with a budget that we would need to build a prototype. Ramona is currently working on preparing her presentation, and we plan to practice with Nate on Sunday.