Navigation and Instrumentation System for Telediagnostic Mobile Robot

The absence of a specialist may cause danger to the patient’s life. This is one of the main concerns in most countries where there are insufficient medical specialists especially in rural area. To address this, a cost effective telediagnostic mobile robot that provides tele-presence capability for the specialist to virtually meet the patient and perform diagnosis is developed. This research highlights the development of a remote mobile robot navigation and instrumentation system as part of the telediagnostic mobile robot. The navigation system incorporates a four wheel holonomic drive system which provides good agility to the robot. The robot is fitted with safety features which include Danger Monitoring System (DMS) and Fail Safe and Auto Recovery System (FSARS). This is realized by equipping it with fuzzy logic based system to process the data and decide preventative measures to avoid danger. On the other hand, the robot’s instrumentation includes a system to acquire Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) reading from a set of medical instruments using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) method on LabVIEW 2009 platform. The system is found to be demonstrating an acceptable performance.

Vigneswaran Ramu, M.Eng (Electrical and Electronic) is a member of Robotics & Intelligent Systems (myRIS) Research Lab at Universiti Malaysia Sabah. His area of expertise are Robotics, Automation and Intelligent Systems.Muralindran Mariappan is the Head of Robotics & Intelligent Systems (myRIS) Research Lab at Universiti Malaysia Sabah.