In the rural and northern communities of Canada, there is a lack of healthcare providers who can perform specialized medical procedures, meaning that the people in these regions oftentimes don’t receive proper healthcare service. This increases the demand for remote surgeries and mentoring which is what we have been working on. The purpose of this project was to securely transfer a surgical tool within a container from the start point to its specific autoclave location. Specifically, the modelling sub team focused on the sterilization and security of holding the tool inside the container while the computing sub team focused on operating the robotic arm.
Looking into the computing sub team, our code consisted of multiple functions that allowed us to interact with Quanser Interactive Labs. Using the muscle sensor emulators, we were able to interact with the arm to perform the different actions required. These actions included picking up, releasing and transferring the container as well as opening, closing and locating the autoclave. To start with, once the arm recognizes the container ID, it uses this value to find the autoclave location using the function with the specified “if” statements. Next, the muscle sensors were implemented for the user to close the gripper and move the container to the specified location. Before releasing the gripper arm, a function was called to open the autoclave if the given container was large. Once the container is dropped, a function similar to open autoclave was called to close the autoclave. Finally, the gripper returns to the original position and repeats the process until all the containers have been transferred. This was controlled with a for loop.