Ultrasound-Guided Assistive Robots for Scoliosis Assessment With Optimization-Based Control and Variable Impedance

Assistive robots for healthcare have witnessed a growing demand over the past decades. In this paper, we investigate the development of an optimization-based control framework with variable impedance for an assistive robot to perform ultrasound-guided scoliosis assessment. The conventional procedure...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 7; no. 3; pp. 1 - 8
Main Authors: Duan, Anqing, Victorova, Maria, Zhao, Jingyuan, Sun, Yuxiang, Zheng, Yongping, Navarro-Alarcon, David
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.07.2022
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Contact force
End effectors
Human engineering
Impedance
Learning from Demonstration
Medical Robots and Systems
Optimization
Optimization and Optimal Control
Physical Human-Robot Interaction
Probes
Quadratic programming
Robot kinematics
Robots
Scoliosis
Service robots
Task analysis
Task and Motion Planning
Ultrasonic imaging
ISSN:2377-3766, 2377-3766
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Assistive robots for healthcare have witnessed a growing demand over the past decades. In this paper, we investigate the development of an optimization-based control framework with variable impedance for an assistive robot to perform ultrasound-guided scoliosis assessment. The conventional procedure for scoliosis assessment using ultrasound imaging typically requires a medical practitioner to slide an ultrasound probe along a patient's back while maintaining a certain magnitude of the contact force. To automate such a procedure, we need to consider multiple objectives, such as contact force, position, orientation, energy, posture, etc. To coordinate different objectives, we propose to formulate the control framework as a quadratic programming problem with each objective weighted by a tunable task priority, subject to a set of equality and inequality constraints. As the procedure requires the robot to establish a constant contact force with the patient during scanning, we incorporate variable impedance regulation of the end-effector to enhance safety and stability during the physical human-robot interaction; The variable impedance gains are then retrieved by learning from medical expert's demonstrations. The proposed methodology is evaluated with a robotic system performing autonomous scoliosis assessment with multiple human subjects involved. The effectiveness of our approach is verified by the coronal spinal images obtained with the robot.
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ISSN:2377-3766
2377-3766
DOI:10.1109/LRA.2022.3186504