Robotic surgical systems have dramatically overcome laparoscopic surgery limitation, which show great touch on the scope of minimum invasive surgery. Robotic surgery has great influence on the surgeon performance and comfort during surgery, in which can handle the procedure with lesser extent of fatigability. Implantation of three-dimension magnified stable camera, articulated instruments, and ability to omit physiologic tremors help to extent scope of dexterity and ergonomics. Therefore, robotic platforms could potentially assist to improve overall patient outcome with highly sophisticated technique. However, the success of Robotic oncological outcome has not addressed well in the literature with on-going controversies. In order to weight and balance the advantages and the cost of robotic surgery, further resources are required to validate the true value of Robotic surgery in colorectal field. The aim of this review is to summarize the current evidence of robotic surgery in clinical and oncological outcomes in colorectal cancer.

Laparoscopic pancreatectomy has evolved from resection of benign lesions to the treatment of malignant lesions without compromising patient safety and oncologic principles. Driven by the technical shortcomings of laparoscopic surgery, robotic pancreatectomy is the latest development in this evolution. Presently, there are limited but increasing amount of data comparing the outcomes of the various approaches for pancreatectomy: robotic versus laparoscopic and open pancreatectomy. Most studies to date are single large institutional retrospective case series or case-control studies reporting on the safety and feasibility of robotic pancreatectomies but most fail to address key issues like cost-benefit ratio and selection biases. Hence, presently, there is only low level evidence from retrospective studies supporting the use of robotic pancreatectomy. These studies have demonstrated that robotic pancreatectomy is safe and feasible with outcomes at least comparable to conventional laparoscopy and open surgery. There is some evidence suggesting that robotic surgery may decrease the learning curve and conversion rate in minimally invasive pancreatic surgery. Further research is needed to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of robotic pancreatectomy with conventional laparoscopy and open surgery.

Mobile health care monitoring system have the capacity to provide critical assistance in areas of medical care, especially in situations where there are limited number of health workers needed to attend to patients. This project describes the development of a mobile health care monitoring system capable of monitoring the heart rate of patients and recording this information electronically. The system will provide much needed relief for medical workers with high volume cases. The system was constructed using a mobile robot capable of traversing rugged terrain, a motor shield, a Global Positioning System (GPS) shield for autonomous navigation, an ultrasound sensor for obstacle avoidance, and a heart rate sensor for measuring patient heart rate. The mobile system was able to successfully avoid obstacles and navigate to the predetermined locations of three hospital beds and obtain the heart rate of three patients. Future improvements to the system include the addition of wireless capability so patient data can be transmitted wirelessly to physician’s PC, incorporation of speech capability to enhance interaction between robot and patient and addition of more sensors to measure other vital signs such as blood glucose.

The modeling and control design of a dragonfly-like flapping wing micro aerial vehicle (FWMAV) are studied in this paper. The aerodynamic force model of flapping wings is presented first, which is obtained by the local air velocity of the wing and local attack angle of the wing, unlike some existing works. Then, the complete mathematic model of FWMAV is developed by combining the aerodynamic force model and a kinematic model in which the micro aerial vehicle is regarded as a 6 degree-of-freedom rigid body. To mimic real dragonflies, the tail of the FWMAV swings only, unlike fixed-wing aircrafts that possess conventional control surfaces in tail. This yields a control difficulty due to the loss of the maneuverability in tail. To design an appropriate control mechanism, the complete FWMAV model, which is highly nonlinear, is rewritten in a companion form. The controller is designed to iteratively solve for a desired control signal profile by means of a dual-loop nonlinear dynamic inversion with Newton-Raphson solution. Numerical simulation results show that the effectiveness and convergence performance of the nonlinear controller are obtained.

Place recognition has been intensively studied in the context of robot vision. BoW-based approach gains its popularity for its efficiency and robustness using features extracted from images. Many features have been examined in the past for place recognition purpose. However, there is no such feature that can outperform others in all environments. Each feature has its own advantage, thus, they should be carefully chosen depending on the context and environments. In this paper, we propose a modified vocabulary tree with the ability of merging multiple kinds of features such that it allows users to customize different combination of features for better place recognition performance. The system is tested in real-time on real-world datasets and the experiments demonstrates the advantage of our system compared to existing approaches.