PRE2020 4 Group8

Team

Members	Student ID	Faculty	E-mail
Ismail Elmasry	1430807	Mechanical Engineering	i.elmasry@student.tue.nl
Ilse Doornbusch	1020872	Psychology and Technology	i.s.doornbusch@student.tue.nl
Amin Mimoun Bourass	1486764	Automotive	a.mimoun.bourass@student.tue.nl
Maud Kunkels	1320025	Industrial Engineering	m.f.kunkels@student.tue.nl

Subject

The field of Robotics and AI is developing increasingly fast. Robots are becoming smaller while their computation power increases. Microrobotics has become popular due to these developments. Microbots can be used in various applications, for example, healthcare, rescue missions and surveillance.

Problem statement and Objectives

Problem Statement

Microbots for rescue and actions taken inside the human body, dependent on the application (urban and healthcare field). The level of autonomy needs to be determined in both applications, taking into account its consequences and pro’s and cons for the relevant stakeholders and the society

Objectives

The objective is to maximize safety of either a (semi-)autonomous microbot in both the rescue and healthcare implementation of the microbots in which human-robot or multi-robot collaboration is optimized. For both application the level of autonomy will be discussed and a design concept will be made. The requirements of healtcare microbot:

USE

User

The target group for our microrobots can be distinguished into two segments. The first consists of the patients in a hospital that require certain sensing and surgery to be performed inside their human body. The other group includes people that have suffered from a natural disaster and need to be found for rescue. In general, the users will include all civilians since it cannot be predetermined whether a person might need surgery or suffers from a disaster. The similarity between the two groups is that when the robot is used for them, they are not able to be in charge of or influence the actions performed. For both of them safety is of high importance since they would like the robot to do their tasks in such a way that they are safely cured or rescued. Over the years, many changes have already taken place in order to improve the performance of actions taken for increasing and optimizing the safety of human beings. In the case that the microrobots will work semi-autonomously, the operators will be part of the users as well. These operators are then the doctors in the hospital and the rescue team (rescuers) that will tele-operate the robots.

Society

Important stakeholders for the use of the microrobots are the medical personnel, hospitals, EMA (European Medicine Agency) and International Rescue System. Furthermore, it is relevant that the society accepts the technology and thus it needs to be checked whether people are willing to let such robots to the work. Especially the level of privacy for citizens need to be guaranteed such that the Government also plays an important role in the implementation of the microrobots.

Enterprise

When microrobots become able to perform the required actions fully autonomously, this will influence the number of jobs that will stay available.