Fondazione Istituto Italiano Di Tecnologia

The Acrobot Company Limited

Kilburn & Strode Llp

Brian Lawrence Davies

Darwin G Caldwell

Leonardo Serra De Mattos

Simon James Harris

Zhuoqi Cheng

Matjaz Jakopec

Apparatus and related methods for assisting tool use includes one or more motors, a wrist support and a shaft coupled to the one or more motors. The shaft includes a coupling to couple to a tool to enable a user resting a hand with the wrist on the wrist support to hold and manipulate the tool with one or more fingers. The apparatus can include a controller configured to: receive position data indicative of a position of an active end of the tool; receive constraint data indicative of one or more regions of space in which the active end should not be positioned; and process the position and constraint data to control the one or more motors to bias the active end out of a region indicated by the constraint data when a position indicated by the position data is within the region indicated by the constraint data.

Apparatus and method for assisting tool use

A hand-held device is provided for precisely positioning a needle tip at a desired target position into a non-homogeneous material, including a blood vessel. The hand-held device includes a casing hand-held by an operator, a shaft extending along a longitudinal axis and carrying the needle, the shaft mounted in the casing and coupled to the casing to move as a single piece therewith along the longitudinal axis. The hand-held device further includes a sensor unit to provide signals indicative of a physical characteristic of the material wherein the needle tip has to be inserted, and a control unit configured to determine, based on the signals received from the sensor unit, whether the needle tip has reached the target position and to operate a decoupling unit to decouple the shaft and the needle from the casing or to operate an actuating unit to actively move the shaft relative to the casing.

Hand-held device for inserting a needle into a non-homogeneous material

An active-constraint robot (), particularly for surgical use, is controlled by means of a series of motorized joints to provide a surgeon with real-time tactile feedback of an operation in progress. The robot system holds, in memory, a series of constraint surfaces beyond which it would be dangerous for the surgeon to go, and a resistive force is applied to the cutting tool () as the surgeon approaches any such surface. To improve the overall quality of feedback experienced by the surgeon, the resistive force applied to the cutting tool () depends upon the point of intersection (I) between the force factor applied by the surgeon and the surface. Further improvements are achieved by adjusting the tangential resistive force, when the tool is adjacent to the surface, in dependence upon the surrounding shape of the surface.

Active-constraint robots

Growing community of inventors

London, United Kingdom

Brian Lawrence Davies