Vision-based autonomous navigation for medical examination using a UR3e manipulator

Abstract

Medical robotics is an emerging field of robotics within a healthcare sector. This interdisciplinary field focuses on prototyping, building and developing advanced robots for numerous clinical application. Modern robotic technologies have a tremendous potential for performing medical examination procedures such as ultrasonography using robotic manipulators that act in an autonomous manner. A manipulator navigation plays a key role in a safe and efficient exploration of a human body. This paper presents a development of a vision-based autonomous navigation system for a 6-DOF UR3e robotic arm. The developed system is based on a 3D point cloud and uses MoveIt for path planning. Gazebo was used as a simulation framework to validate the navigation system.