Deep Movement Primitives: toward Breast Cancer Examination Robot
This addresses the complex and unsolved issue of robot programming for breast cancer examination, potentially impacting healthcare by enabling autonomous robotic palpation.
The paper tackles the problem of robot programming for autonomous breast palpation by introducing deep Movement Primitives, which generate manipulator movements based on visual sensory information, and shows it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in real-robot experiments.
Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer worldwide. A robotic system performing autonomous breast palpation can make a significant impact on the related health sector worldwide. However, robot programming for breast palpating with different geometries is very complex and unsolved. Robot learning from demonstrations (LfD) reduces the programming time and cost. However, the available LfD are lacking the modelling of the manipulation path/trajectory as an explicit function of the visual sensory information. This paper presents a novel approach to manipulation path/trajectory planning called deep Movement Primitives that successfully generates the movements of a manipulator to reach a breast phantom and perform the palpation. We show the effectiveness of our approach by a series of real-robot experiments of reaching and palpating a breast phantom. The experimental results indicate our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method.