

Ask HN: Suggest a Novel Robotics Project for PhD, Bio-inspired Direction - jmiseikis

I&#x27;m just starting my PhD with focus on bio-inspired robotics. I&#x27;m lucky to have quite a lot of freedom to choose the project I want to work on, as long as it fits the focus of the lab. Currently, the focus is on evolutionary robotics, AI, analysing the gap between simulation and reality and robotic surgery. Personally, I have quite a strong background in Computer Vision and loved working with ROS on my Masters project. The resources I have access to:
- Two advanced 3D printers
- Motoman SIA20 7 DoF robotic arm
- Universal Robots robotic arm
- Couple of high precision motion capture systems
- Nao
- Otto Bock SensorHand
- Kinects, Leap Motion and other various sensors
- People and doctors working at university hospital
- Some FPGA experts<p>... and of course hardware could be bought given a good project.<p>As you see, it&#x27;s quite a good opportunity, so I&#x27;d like to hear your opinions on what you would do in my position without actually giving my thoughts first. Quite crazy thoughts are appreciated as well! :-)
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schrodingersCat
This really depends on how practical you want to get. One of the biggest
problems in hospitals is (lack of) staffing. Having a robot that could go
around the rooms and check on low-level, treatment related problems would be a
huge improvement in patient care. Imagine using CV to check on IV pumps for
flow rate, how much of the drug is left, is it leaking, does the patient need
more IV fluids, does the name on the drug label match the patient's, etc.
These are low level problems that can lead to injury and death of patients in
hospitals, and usually handled by overworked nurses. Seems like a perfect
application of CV to me.

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jmiseikis
Interesting idea, thanks! gonna think on how rfid or similar tagging can help
to avoid adding complex CV algorithms where much easier alternatives could be
offered. There are some robots moving around trolleys with items already
there, so staff and patients are getting used to see machines sharing same
corridors

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schrodingersCat
New rfid applications would be great and by means pursue them! The reason I
think this is a great problem for CV is that right now, only a nurse would be
able to tell if there is a puddle on the floor from a leaking IV, patient's
puke, overflown catheter bag, etc. Also is there air in a line, does the label
on the drug match the prescription in EMR? These are common sense, cheap to
fix / prevent problems that I'm not sure rfid could solve. RFID would be great
for matching drug labeled with rfid with chip in patient's armband. One could
think of lots of implementations for that sort of thing!

I guess it really comes down to what sort of focus you want your project to
take, and what idea you think your PI will be interested in considering. Good
luck!

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Qworg
I'd do doctor training or correction. An expert "extra pair of eyes" is a
project I've not seen anything on.

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jmiseikis
Interesting idea. However, I believe doctor correction can be a very delicate
matter as professionals are still not happy of machines pretending to "know
better". However, we did discuss some surgeon assisting robots, like holding
various tools or ultrasound scanner in place and adjusting for patient's body
movements

