Real-time Interaction of a 7-DOF Robot for Teleoperated Ultrasonic Scanning

Abstract

Ultrasound is widely employed in disease screening and diagnosis. However, ultrasound scanning requires experienced sonographers manually operating probes to search the lesions inside patients, which is unavailable in rural or remote areas. Recently, teleoperated ultrasound scanning systems are proposed to enable sonographers to conduct scanning and diagnosis remotely. Nevertheless, these systems cannot offer a good sense of operation. This paper proposed a teleoperated ultrasonic scanning allowing sonographers to control the remote scanning probe with a glove in real-time. It can significantly increase the sense of operation. Experiments show its feasibility and a good sense of operation. It is noteworthy that the system is potential and easy to upgrade.