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

Logbook

The logbook of the team can be found on the page Logbook Group 8

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 healthcare implementation of the microbots in which human-robot or multi-robot collaboration is optimized. The level of autonomy will be discussed and a design concept will be made. The requirements of healthcare microbot:

Requirements

• Controllable, the microbot should be human-controllable.
• Safe, the microbot should operate with safety as priority
• Durable, the microbot should be able to withstand the operating conditions
• Autonomy, the microbot should have some level of autonomy
• Multi-robot collaboration, the microbot should be able to communicate with other microbots and they should operate as a group

Contraints

• Size, the microbot for health should be small enough to travel in the human body.

USE

User

The target group for our microrobots consists of the patients in a hospital that require certain sensing and surgery to be performed inside their human body. In general, the users can of course be classified into all civilians since it cannot be predetermined whether a person might need surgery or health care. For the users 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. When the tasks are carried out by the robots, the patients do not have responsibility about the actions taken and are therefore not in charge of their own body anymore. This can give the feelings of inconvenience for a patient as the caring of their body is displaced by a robot.(1) Many changes have already taken place in order to improve the quality delivered by healthcare services to contribute to the safety and health of human beings in hospitals. Examples are surgery systems with partial autonomy or social robots that are used to provide aids or drugs to patients. (2)

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 that may tele-operate the robots. For them it is important that the human-robot clinical settings are well designed. (3) With reference to robot technology innovations, good human-robot interaction is determined to include some aspects and an barriers should be overcome. (4) The aspects that should be present for the user interface consist of awareness, efficiency, familiarity and responsiveness. The barrier is that the sensing and perception of the robot should match with that of a human being which implies that the sensors need to be shown such that the doctor will still have sufficient situational awareness to stay capable of making a good model of the environment. (4)

Society

Important stakeholders for the use of the microrobots are the medical personnel, hospitals and EMA (European Medicine Agency). 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 since the robots are mobile and able to gather personal data such that the government also plays an important role in the implementation of the microrobots(1). Next to that, the acceptance of robot technology in healthcare is generally considered to have a low rate due to complications in human-robot interaction. Such complications include a fear of displacement by a robot, safety and appropriateness(1).

Enterprise

First of all, to make the design of a good microrobot to be used, experts in robotics and automation are required. Due to the fact that aspects influencing the innovation of robot technology do not stay the same over time, research needs to be continued on the technologies used and new adoptions should be made where possible. Accordingly, the capabilities and functionalities of technologies will evolve and this needs to be taken into account within the company or institution that will be in charge of the robots. Furthermore, when microrobots become able to perform the required actions fully autonomously, this will influence the number of jobs that will stay available within the healthcare services. Doctors might lose their job as human tasks will be replaced by the work done by robots.

Plan

A structured approach is needed to guide the team towards a valid answer to the research problem at hand. Therefore, the approach taken is not just limited to scientific research but also an attempt to solve a design problem.

Approach and milestones

1. Conduct research

In this objective the team conducts extensive research to find the state-of-the-art technologies in the field of medical micro-robotics. Furthermore, a summary of the research will be created to frame the most significant findings. This will allow the team to have a well-constructed Knowledge bases, which will be used in different parts of the research.

2. Design analysis

In this section the different design objects of microrobots will be defined and analyzed. This is important since it gives the team a well-rounded understanding of the design goals for both the hardware and the software.

3. Current technological Limitations

Medical microrobots that are being tested today are still subjectively primal when compared to the progress in the robotics domain. Therefore, the design, technology and engineering limitations will be investigated to define a design problem to attempt to solve.

4. Applications and autonomy level analysis

Medical microrobots have a large number of applications starting from drug delivery to surgical and all the way to DNA manipulation. Therefore, depending on the application different levels of autonomy are required and therefore, different use impacts. Therefore, a number of these applications will be carefully chosen to construct an abstract guide to the implementation of the USE analysis.

5. Experts’ views and arguments

Experts have different views on the deployment of microrobots and allowing them to be utilized to monitor and manipulate the human body. Therefore, the different pros and cons will be thoroughly analyzed in this section.

6. Impact of the technology on different stakeholders

In this section the psychological and physical impacts of this technology on different stakeholders will be addressed. This will allow the team to have a clear view on the societal impact of the technology.

7. Future possibilities and design implementation

In this section the team is given the possibility to have a creative outlook on the technology. This will allow the team to combine their imagination with objective reasoning to construct a design of a futuristic microrobot or attempt to solve one of the design problems discussed above.

Deliverables

The deliverables for this project will consist of a case study report on the technology, a USE case analysis on the impact of technology on different stakeholders, and last but not least a design/prototype of a micro-robot.