Group 066-01: Medical Robotics for Minimally Invasive Surgeries

During week 8 of our Engineering Design Project, we were able to get the finalized dish holder part with the correct dimensions and we were able to create a draft for out Final Project Report and a final specification sheet. We calculated the precise distance between the big magnet and the dish. The biggest progress, however, was with the image processing and motor control code. We were able to create a code in MATLAB that can control the stepper motor. Moreover, we were able to adjust the code for the image processing - since the processing is really dependent on the environment we adjusted the light settings as well as the radius of the magnetic sphere. Most, importantly we were able to combine the motor control code with the image processing so that the moment the sphere gets into the fourth quadrant the motor starts spinning counterclockwise - the goal will be to keep the magnet on the positive x-axis (the origin of the coordinate system is at the center of the circular track). ...

During week 7, we worked on our draft final report and set up the experiment to get an idea of the orientation of each part of our project. We 3D printed the motor holder and placed the motor into it. We prepared more agarose gel in the lab for testing. Also, we worked on configuring the stepper motor with the ardumoto shield to enable it to rotate perfectly. We used MATLAB to achieve this and simultaneously worked on the image processing for the magnetic sphere. We were facing problems in identifying a particular circular object using MATLAB because the code identified and produced numerous circles. However, we are only interested in identifying the small magnetic sphere using the camera. Therefore, we are working on modifying the code to focus on only the small magnetic sphere. Figure 1: Experimental Set-up Figure 2: Motor holder

During week 6, we modified the design of our dish holder because we decided to use a small petri dish that would hold less gel and make the experiment easier to perform. We sent our designed part for 3D printing. However, our 3D printed request could not be found by the innovation studio. Therefore, we had to request for another design and we started working on the design for the motor holder. We got our 3D  printed magnet holder and made some agarose gel in the lab. Then, we tested the magnetic sphere in the lab by positioning the magnet holder containing the magnet at different positions. We did this to get an idea of the distance we need to place the magnet holder for optimal rotation of the sphere around a circular orbit. With regards to our motor and Arduino set-up, we decided to use an ardumotor shield to control our set up easily with the MATLAB. Using our image processing code, we examined the magnetic sphere in the gel but we need to figure out how to minimiz...

Throughout week 5 of our Freshman Engineering Design Project, we focused on researching the way to make the 0.6% agarose gel. We used the wet lab in the Innovation Studio to try and create our first two samples of the gel. These two samples were left in the fridge for a few days and will be used during week 6 for the first few tests of our design. Moreover, we redesigned our 3D design for the dish holder. Since our first 3D print design had slightly mismeasured dimensions we made the appropriate corrections and the part is now designed to hold a much smaller dish. The new design will be submitted to be 3D printed during week 6. In addition, we finalized and submitted the 3D design for the big magnet holder. Most importantly, the team decided to make a big change to the initially proposed design. We are no longer going to use a big board in which all the parts would go. Instead, we will 3D print all of the parts with their own base and we will move them around freely.

During week 4 of our Freshman Design Project, we finalized the design of the 3D print parts and printed a sample for the part that will hold the dish. The sample, however, had a few errors in the dimensions. The hole in which the motor is supposed to go in was a little bit too small and the part that is supposed to hold the dish had slightly larger dimensions so the dish could move freely. With that in mind, we are planning to alter the dimensions so that they fit perfectly. Moreover, we are planning to make a second dish holder part for the second dish with smaller dimensions. A dish with smaller diameter means that the circle which we will have to make will be smaller and thus there will be less space for errors. When it comes to the code, we managed to get live feed in Matlab from the webcam which we purchased. In addition, we added code that can recognize circles and mark them with a red circle, however, we haven't tested the code on a perfect circle within the dish. This w...