"Telepresence" is an interesting field that includes virtual reality implementations with human-system interfaces, communication technologies, and robotics. This paper describes the development of a telepresence robot called Telepresence Robot for Interpersonal Communication (TRIC) for the purpose of interpersonal communication with the elderly in a home environment. The main aim behind TRIC's development is to allow elderly populations to remain in their home environments, while loved ones and caregivers are able to maintain a higher level of communication and monitoring than via traditional methods. TRIC aims to be a low-cost, lightweight robot, which can be easily implemented in the home environment. Under this goal, decisions on the design elements included are discussed. In particular, the implementation of key autonomous behaviors in TRIC to increase the user's capability of projection of self and operation of the telepresence robot, in addition to increasing the interactive capability of the participant as a dialogist are emphasized. The technical development and integration of the modules in TRIC, as well as human factors considerations are then described. Preliminary functional tests show that new users were able to effectively navigate TRIC and easily locate visual targets. Finally the future developments of TRIC, especially the possibility of using TRIC for home tele-health monitoring and tele-homecare visits are discussed.

Robot-assisted surgery is an active interdisciplinary field. Conventional surgical robots are mostly serial architectures, which have the advantages of large workspace, high dexterity and maneuverability. The disadvantages are low stiffness and poor positioning accuracy compared to the parallel structure robots. This paper presents the development of a parallel surgical robot for precise skull drilling in stereotactic neurosurgical operations. The dimensions of this robot are 35 × 35 × 45 cm 3, and its weight is about 6 kg. This surgical robot has 6° of freedom. The feed carriage of the bone drilling device mounted the parallel surgical robot provides one additional translational degree of freedom. A master-slave microcontroller-based system is designed for pose control. In applications for neurosurgical operation, the workspace is on the surface of a skull located at one side of the robot. This work analyzed asymmetric workspace on the surface of a sphere representing the skull. A special socket joint design that enlarges the asymmetric workspace of the robot for about 30% is also proposed. This parallel surgical robot has been integrated with an automatic bone drilling carriage developed in our previous work to achieve completely automatic bone drilling.

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