This paper proposes SquiggleMilli, a system that approximates traditional Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging on mobile millimeter-wave (mmWave) devices. The system is capable of imaging through obstructions, such as clothing, and under low visibility conditions. Unlike traditional SAR that relies on mechanical controllers or rigid bodies, SquiggleMilli is based on the hand-held, fluidic motion of the mmWave device. It enables mmWave imaging in hand-held settings by re-thinking existing motion compensation, compressed sensing, and voxel segmentation. Since mmWave imaging suffers from poor resolution due to specularity and weak reflectivity, the reconstructed shapes could be imperceptible by machines and humans. To this end, SquiggleMilli designs a machine learning model to recover the high spatial frequencies in the object to reconstruct an accurate 2D shape and predict its 3D features and category. We have customized SquiggleMilli for security applications, but the model is adaptable to other applications with limited training samples. We implement SquiggleMilli on off-the-shelf components and demonstrate its performance improvement over the traditional SAR qualitatively and quantitatively.
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Design and Control of a Hand-Held Concentric Tube Robot for Minimally Invasive Surgery
Minimally invasive surgery is of high interest for interventional medicine since the smaller incisions can lead to less pain and faster recovery for patients. The current standard-of-care involves a range of affordable, manual, hand-held rigid tools, whose limited dexterity and range of adoptable shapes can prevent access to confined spaces. In contrast, recently developed roboticized tools that can provide increased accessibility and dexterity to navigate and perform complex tasks often come at the cost of larger, heavier, and grounded devices that are teleoperated, posing a new set of challenges. In this article, we propose a new hand-held concentric tube robot with an associated position control method that has the dexterity and precision of large roboticized devices, while maintaining the footprint of a traditional hand-held tool. The device shows human-in-the-loop control performance that meets the requirements of the targeted application, percutaneous abscess drainage. In addition, a small user study illustrates the advantage of combining rigid body motion of the device with more precise motions of the tip, thus showing the potential to bridge the gap between traditional hand-held tools and grounded robotic devices.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1850400
- PAR ID:
- 10230634
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Robotics
- ISSN:
- 1552-3098
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 17
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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