Closed-Loop Control of Patient Handling Robots

Patient handling robots are increasingly employed to enable a flexible positioning of the patient for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Due to the greatly differing robot loads because of varying patient weights especially serial kinematics are no longer able to keep up with the constantly increasing medical demands for positioning accuracy. In this chapter a low-cost measuring system for a permanent integration into the workspace of a patient handling robot is introduced which can measure the pose of a patient couch with high accuracy. This enables closed-loop control of the patient couch. In tests on a robot system an average positioning error of 0.12 mm was achieved for a diversity of medically relevant poses.

[1]  C. J. Karzmark,et al.  Medical Electron Accelerators , 1992 .

[2]  Russell H. Taylor,et al.  Medical robotics in computer-integrated surgery , 2003, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[3]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  Springer Handbook of Robotics , 2007, Springer Handbooks.

[4]  Ronald Lumia,et al.  An Automated Method to Calibrate Industrial Robots Using a Virtual Closed Kinematic Chain , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[5]  Stephen Kyle,et al.  Large‐Scale Metrology , 2005 .

[6]  Jens Wulfsberg,et al.  Practical robot calibration with ROSY , 2004, Robotica.

[7]  Christoph Herrmann,et al.  Positioning and synchronization of industrial robots , 2010, 2010 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation.

[8]  Robert Schmitt,et al.  Performance evaluation of iGPS for industrial applications , 2010, 2010 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation.

[9]  Jerzy E. Kurek,et al.  Application of Joint Error Mutual Compensation for Robot End-effector Pose Accuracy Improvement , 2003, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[10]  William T. Estler,et al.  Large-Scale Metrology – An Update , 2002 .

[11]  Klaus Radermacher,et al.  Accuracy of Optical Localizers for Computer Aided Surgery , 2009 .

[12]  Steven Dubowsky,et al.  Geometric and elastic error calibration of a high accuracy patient positioning system , 2005 .

[13]  Jörg Franke,et al.  A cost-effective stereo camera system for online pose control of patient handling robots , 2011, The 5th International Conference on Automation, Robotics and Applications.