Soft Control Interface for Highly Dexterous Unilateral Remote Palpation

Abstract

Achieving telepresence is the biggest challenge preventing healthcare robotics to permeate the field of primary care and performing tasks such as remote palpation. To do so, the user interface is of fundamental importance: ideally, it would reproduce similar conditions to the in-person task, resulting in intuitive and natural. Many studies focused on the high fidelity of the haptic and tactile feedback, overlooking the importance of the control interface. On the other hand, stateof-the-art soft control interfaces showcase high telepresence but low dexterity, limiting the user's range of motion. In this paper, a soft control interface for highly dexterous remote palpation, up to 5 degrees of freedom, is presented. The aim of this work is to use morphological computation to intrinsically encode hand trajectories, showcasing 3 different designs to test and optimize the interface's embodied intelligence. Then, the performance of the proposed interface is analyzed as a controller of a unilateral teleoperated system. The results show that the device is able to correctly encode the hand's motion and reproduce complex trajectories up to 5 DoF. Compared with keyboard control, it replicates 2D trajectories in a similar fashion, while maintaining the intuitiveness and naturalness of palpation.

Multi-silicone Bilateral Soft Physical Twin as an Alternative to Traditional User Interfaces for Remote Palpation: a Comparative Study

“…u(•) is the step function and v 0 is a constant speed selected to be 20 mm/s. For the participants' study, the threshold values θ 0 and θ 1 have been selected as 0.09 and 0.01, respectively, based on previous studies of such technology 38 .…”

“…However, all reported cases of bilateral physical twins either have extremely limited degrees of freedom (DoFs) or have solely been tested in simulation and not in a real leader-follower architecture. Recently, Costi et al 38 , have demonstrated how it is possible to use barometric sensors in a silicone interface to achieve precise dexterous control of up to 5 DoFs.…”

“…The proposed interface has the aim to effectively reproduce the sense of touch remotely, closing the gap between remote palpation and in-person palpation. To do so we make large use of soft robotics by combining previous design principles about soft sensing 38 and soft actuation 34 to obtain an entirely soft bilateral device with the attempt to resemble as close as possible the intrinsic compliance characteristic of the hand-abdomen contact. Moreover, we utilize the design principle of multi-silicone casting to ensure high sensitivity in the sensing chambers and reduce cross-noise and potential actuation-driven instabilities.…”