Robotics Meets Cosmetic Dermatology: Development of a Novel Vision-Guided System for Skin Photo-Rejuvenation
This addresses the need for precise and automated cosmetic dermatology procedures, representing an incremental advancement by applying robotics to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of automating skin photo-rejuvenation by developing a robotic system that uses vision-guided planning to uniformly deliver laser energy on facial skin, reporting experimental validation with human subjects.
In this paper, we present a novel robotic system for skin photo-rejuvenation procedures, which can uniformly deliver the laser's energy over the skin of the face. The robotised procedure is performed by a manipulator whose end-effector is instrumented with a depth sensor, a thermal camera, and a cosmetic laser generator. To plan the heat stimulating trajectories for the laser, the system computes the surface model of the face and segments it into seven regions that are automatically filled with laser shots. We report experimental results with human subjects to validate the performance of the system. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first time that facial skin rejuvenation has been automated by robot manipulators.