Advances in Robotics & Automation

Introduction: Ever since the first RALP was performed in May 2000, the robotic approach has surpassed the expectations with >80% of prostatectomies in the United States being performed using the robot. Other than technical advances taking place with the robotic machine and the robotic instruments, there have been massive strides in the improvement of the technique. Better understanding of the anatomy of the neurovascular bundles and also the improvements in the imaging technology has impacted on the way the procedure is performed. This review looks into the developments that have taken place over the last three years. Materials and methods: Articles pertaining to robot assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy published over the last three years were extracted from PUBMED and analysed. Those articles that have impacted on the clinical practice were reviewed. Results: Recently, the concept of incremental nerve sparing techniques has emerged. Two leading authorities have classified the degree of nerve sparing based on visual cues and have demonstrated its impact on functional and oncological outcomes. Another technical modification to the procedure has been in inserting a supra-pubic catheter. This has been shown to improve the quality of life of patients by avoiding a per-urethral catheter without any negative impact on continence or increased risk of bladder neck contracture. Previously, nerve sparing was correlated with erectile function. However, recent studies have highlighted that nerve preservation has also an impact on the continence rates. Randomized control trials have now demonstrated the superiority of barbed sutures over the conventional monofilament sutures. Image guided surgery is making its way into RALP and more research in this field will aid in better oncological control with minimal sacrifice of important structures around the prostate. Conclusion: Advances in surgical techniques are resulting in better functional and oncological outcomes. This has a direct impact in improving the quality of life for the patients. More research into application of emerging technology such as integration of image-guided surgery will herald better outcomes in the near future.

This paper presents a new approach for estimating contact force and slippage by using a vision-based tactile sensor with a fluid-type touchpad for the dexterous handling of robots. The sensor consists of a CCD camera, LED lights, a transparent acrylic plate and a deformable touchpad. The sensor can obtain a variety of tactile information, such as the contact force, shape, contact region, position and orientation of an object in contact with the fluid-type touchpad. The previous method for measuring contact force requires extensive calculation; this paper proposes a new method based on lookup tables for measuring normal force, tangential force and moment, using a fluid-type touchpad. Additionally, we clarify the mechanism of slippage between a fluid-type touchpad and a contacted object. This mechanism is efficient for applying the proposed slippage estimation method to a fluid-type touchpad. The validation of the proposed methods is confirmed in the experimental results.

This paper presents a concept for reconfigurable and flexible robot systems. To reach a technology readiness level where solutions and results can be implemented in industry, the focus in this work is on systems with limited number of robots, and work scenarios which are reasonable complex but hard to automate using standard solutions. Four distinct areas have been identified as important within the concept and further studies: (i) human machine interaction, (ii) safety including collaboration, (iii) programming and deployment, and (iv) planning and scheduling. Feasibility studies have been made which addressed issues (ii) and (iii), in scenarios with collaboration between robot and human, or between two robots. For the chosen work scenario, manufacturing of structures in wood for family houses, challenges related to programming and safety was identified and possible solutions outlined. The concept and the studies indicate that feasible solutions can be found and designed given a reasonable consistent work processes and products. In this study, the processes are similar, nailing and screwing but different sizes may apply, the material is similar but variations may apply, and the construction is different of each product, but include the same type of operations at different locations. Our study confirm that human collaboration improves the ability to implement and use robots as it make it possible to move some operations to the human which otherwise would add to the complexity of the system. Furthermore, programming can also I general be simplified although methods for automatic programming has been tried out. But in some cases, the solution space is limited and the ability to move certain operations to a human simplifies the programming task. However, further work needs to be done in this area specifically related to safety issues for safe collaboration.

DNA Sequence Compression can be achieved through exploiting the intra-sequence and inter-sequence similarities. In order to have a good compression gain, effective methods have to be used to search for all the similar subsequences within the DNA sequences so that these similar subsequences can be encoded together. Different pattern recognition methods have been used to search for these similar subsequences. They are suffix-based approach, dynamic programming approach, seed extension approach, rule-based approach and parsing approach. A survey of their main ideas and application domains has been given in this paper.