Experiments with the TER Tele-echography Robot

This paper presents a master-slave system applied to the remote diagnosis from echographic data. The motion of the master manipulator is remotely controlled by a physician and reproduced by a slave robot carrying the echographic probe. The contact force between the probe and the patient is fed back to operator allowing him to have a haptic virtual environment. The innovation of this haptic control is to preserve medical expert propioception and gesture feelings, which are necessary to synchronize the ultrasound images with the motion made by the medical doctor. The slave robot is a cable-driven manipulator using pneumatic artificial muscle actuators to control the motion of the ultrasound probe. In this paper we present the architecture and the performances of the slave robot and the first experiments of the master-slave remote echography system for examinations of pregnant women.