Contribution to the design of robotized tele-echography system

This paper introduces the design of a master-slave robotized system for tele-ultrasound application. The objective of these researches is to design the slave manipulator of this system and its control device (master part). The specification process of the architecture kinematic is based on the analysis of expert's gesture during ultrasound examinations. These studies have been carried out using a motion capture system. The medical gestures were analyzed in terms of ultrasound probe attitude and used in the definition of the kinematics specifications of the proposed manipulator. The Spherical Parallel Mechanism is selected because its characteristics meet the constraint requirements. The optimal synthesis of spherical parallel manipulators is performed using a realcoded Genetic Algorithm based method. Simulations on the actuator responses of the structure allowed us the validate it. In order to control this robot, we have also designed a haptic device that provides easiness to use as well as force feedback. Its orientation control strategy is based on a use of an adaptative kalman filter which efficiency was demonstrated during experimentations.