A Multi-Robot Cooperation Framework for Sewing Personalized Stent Grafts
This addresses the need for flexible production of customized medical devices, such as stent grafts, through multi-robot cooperation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing learning-by-demonstration and modular robotics approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of manufacturing personalized medical stent grafts by developing a multi-robot system with a modular design, including a personalized mandrel, bimanual sewing using learning-by-demonstration, and vision-based coordination, resulting in robots that can adapt to generalized stent designs.
This paper presents a multi-robot system for manufacturing personalized medical stent grafts. The proposed system adopts a modular design, which includes: a (personalized) mandrel module, a bimanual sewing module, and a vision module. The mandrel module incorporates the personalized geometry of patients, while the bimanual sewing module adopts a learning-by-demonstration approach to transfer human hand-sewing skills to the robots. The human demonstrations were firstly observed by the vision module and then encoded using a statistical model to generate the reference motion trajectories. During autonomous robot sewing, the vision module plays the role of coordinating multi-robot collaboration. Experiment results show that the robots can adapt to generalized stent designs. The proposed system can also be used for other manipulation tasks, especially for flexible production of customized products and where bimanual or multi-robot cooperation is required.