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Action Augmentation of Tactile Perception for Soft-Body Palpation.

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Hughes, Josie 
Maiolino, Perla 
He, Liang 
Nanayakkara, Thrishantha 

Abstract

Medical palpation is a diagnostic technique in which physicians use the sense of touch to manipulate the soft human tissue. This can be done to enable the diagnosis of possibly life-threatening conditions, such as cancer. Palpation is still poorly understood because of the complex interaction dynamics between the practitioners' hands and the soft human body. To understand this complex of soft body interactions, we explore robotic palpation for the purpose of diagnosing the presence of abnormal inclusions, or tumors. Using a Bayesian framework for training and classification, we show that the exploration of soft bodies requires complex, multi-axis, palpation trajectories. We also find that this probabilistic approach is capable of rapidly searching the large action space of the robot. This work progresses "robotic" palpation, and it provides frameworks for understanding and exploiting soft body interactions.

Description

Keywords

soft haptics, soft tactile perception, soft tissue palpation, Bayes Theorem, Humans, Palpation, Robotics, Touch, Touch Perception

Journal Title

Soft Robot

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2169-5172
2169-5180

Volume Title

Publisher

Mary Ann Liebert Inc

Rights

All rights reserved
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/N029003/1)
Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) (CP 172)
EPSRC (EP/T00519X/1)
This work was funded by the UK Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (CP 172), Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) MOTION grant [EP/N03211X/2] and RoboPatient grant [EP/T00519X/1].