iCROSS

The Design and Evaluation of the Infant Cardiac Robotic Surgical System (iCROSS) was the primary research project I was involved in during my undergraduate years. This research focuses on developing a dual-arm surgical robot system to assist infant PDA closure through teleoperation, including mechatronics, system integration, and mechanical and software design. I was responsible for the software of this robotic system which mainly included the following tasks: designing and implementing a software structure that manages joystick-based human-robot interaction and detects self-collision of the surgical robot.

By developing a force rendering algorithm and post-processing the joystick readings using Unity, I successfully overlapped the workspaces for teleoperation and provided haptic feedback. I implemented a rapid collision detection algorithm that could run at 60 Hz using LabVIEW regarding collision avoidance. The algorithm is a modified version of oriented bounding boxes (OBB), which differs from the original version by a more detailed bounding mechanism using different geometries and constructing several conditional statements to increase calculation speed. These promising results led to our publication in IROS 2022.

Publication Link: IROS 2022

Publication PDF: PDF

Demo video at: Demo