Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Motivation Surgical tasks requiring a very high level of precision and accuracy are extremely dependent on the hand dexterity and surgical skill proficiency of the surgeons, which are partially enhanced by current tools. Teleoperated robotic platforms with enhancements such as haptic (touch) feedback, image-guidance, semi-automation, artificial intelligence, human-robot collaboration, machine vision, and artificial virtual fixtures can provide engineering and technical solutions to improve surgeons' ability to push the boundaries of these limitations further. In the short term, these technological solutions can improve the quality of healthcare (e.g., the extent of tumor resection in brain surgery), provide novel tools for surgeons to perform procedures that were very hard otherwise, or even open the doors for surgical procedures that were deemed impossible previously. In the long term, these technical solutions will decrease the time and thus costs associated with the surgical procedures and will provide potential benefits such as better patient outcomes, increased surgical safety, and higher quality of life and shorter recovery time for patients after surgery. Objective There are still several technical and engineering challenges in a number of core areas of haptic-enabled teleoperation of robots that need fundamental research and investigation in control theory, stability, robustness, manipulability, multi-agent robotic systems, haptic-visual servoing, and other primary engineering theories and methods, to be able to provide practical and viable telerobotic solutions. Such systems should provide tangible benefits, be suitable for the targeted application, and be easy to use for surgeons and operators. These can be achieved by introducing innovative technologies in engineering and science and their application in telerobotic systems. Accordingly, this research program proposes a new paradigm towards providing fundamental engineering solutions through state-of-the-art research to tackle challenges and issues associated with telerobotics and haptics, and to provide novel and intelligent control methods to advance the knowledge in this field, towards global adoption of such robotic systems in medical and industrial applications. Impact The research problems to be addressed in this program are driven by real needs, ensuring that results would benefit applications with practical value. They will extend the ability of surgeons in challenging milieu of very hard surgical procedures and will increase capability of the operators in performing tasks that were high-risk or impossible before. Having the vision of providing innovative technical solutions for long-term improvement of healthcare delivery, treatment, robot-assisted intervention, and training of new healthcare professionals, will result in improving quality of healthcare and cost reduction, while diversifying the Canadian economy and providing jobs in high-tech industries for Canadians.