Hyosig Kang

RIO: Robotic-Arm Interactive Orthopedic System MAKOplasty: User Interactive Haptic Orthopedic Robotics

The dream of robots, automatons that can think, move, and act like humans, has been with us for centuries, dating back to Leonardo daVinci, the ancient Greeks, and possibly even earlier. The word robot was introduced by Czech writer Karel Capek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), published in 1920. Capek’s play describes robots that are very close to the androids of films like Star Wars – mechanical, intelligent servants with a purpose to serve their human masters.

A pre-operative approach of range of motion simulation and verification for femoroacetabular impingement

Femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) is increasingly recognized as a potential cause of hip osteoarthritis. A system capable of pre‐operatively simulating hip range of motion (ROM) by given surface models from either healthy or FAI diseased bone is desirable.

A novel passive haptic device for simulating a broad range of impedances

The strength of a haptic display may be assessed from its range of stable impedances. This paper presents a novel passive haptic display (PARM) capable of simulating a broad range of impedances. It comprises a passive constraint that can simulate both uninhibited motion through free-space and collision into a rigid obstacle. In free-space, the user feels the natural impedance of the end-effector without the added inertia and friction from a transmission or actuator. In a collision with a rigid object, haptic stiffness can be much greater than a traditional impedance haptic display. An experimental study with a 2 DoF planar manipulator illustrates the minimum and maximum impedances that are attainable for this haptic display. The inertial mass and friction in free-space are less than 0.2 kg and 12.3 Ns/m, and the stiffness against a haptic boundary is 465 N/mm. In addition, collision with a haptic object produces a more authentic experience, since there are naturally-occurring high frequency oscillations that result from the physical collision between two objects. This novel haptic display has both the minimum impedance benefits of impedance haptic displays and the maximum impedance benefits of admittance haptic displays.