A UHF RFID positioning system for use in warehouse navigation by employees with cognitive disability.

Unemployment among the almost 5 million working-age adults with cognitive disabilities in the USA is a costly problem in both tax dollars and quality of life. Job coaching is an effective tool to overcome this, but the cost of job coaching services sums with every new employee or change of employment roles. There is a need for a cost-effective, automated alternative to job coaching that incurs a one-time cost and can be reused for multiple employees or roles.

Flexible and capsule endoscopy for screening, diagnosis and treatment.

Endoscopy dates back to the 1860s, but many of the most significant advancements have been made within the past decade. With the integration of robotics, the ability to precisely steer and advance traditional flexible endoscopes has been realized, reducing patient pain and improving clinician ergonomics. Additionally, wireless capsule endoscopy, a revolutionary alternative to traditional scopes, enables inspection of the digestive system with minimal discomfort for the patient or the need for sedation, mitigating some of the risks of flexible endoscopy.

Wireless tissue palpation for intraoperative detection of lumps in the soft tissue.

In an open surgery, identification of precise margins for curative tissue resection is performed by manual palpation. This is not the case for minimally invasive and robotic procedures, where tactile feedback is either distorted or not available. In this paper, we introduce the concept of intraoperative wireless tissue palpation.

A quasi-static model of wheel-tissue interaction for surgical robotics.

Wheel-driven mobile in vivo robotic devices can provide an unconstrained platform for visualization and task performance. Careful understanding of the wheel-tissue interaction is necessary to predict in vivo performance of medical mobility systems. Here, an analytical study of the friction involving rolling contact of a surgical wheel, moving at constant velocities over soft tissue, is presented and verified.

The design and characterization of a testing platform for quantitative evaluation of tread performance on multiple biological substrates.

In this study, an experimental platform is developed to quantitatively measure the performance of robotic wheel treads in a dynamic environment. The platform imposes a dynamic driving condition for a single robot wheel, where the wheel is rotated on a translating substrate, thereby inducing slip. The normal force of the wheel can be adjusted mechanically, while the rotational velocity of the wheel and the translational velocity of the substrate can be controlled using an open-loop control system.

Surgical evaluation of a novel tethered robotic capsule endoscope using micro-patterned treads.

Background: The state-of-the-art technology for gastrointestinal (GI) tract exploration is a capsule endoscope (CE). Capsule endoscopes are pill-sized devices that provide visual feedback of the GI tract as they move passively through the patient. These passive devices could benefit from a mobility system enabling maneuverability and controllability.