Bot Nurse 1.0 - An IoT Surgery Assistive Robot

Surgeries are crucial procedures performed by trained professionals. These procedures can take very little time to several hours and require a significant amount of patience and concentration from the surgical team. The unavailability of an adequate number of surgical staff members can result in a shortage of personnel to serve and retrieve surgical tools. In this context, robotics systems can be used. However, the available robotic systems require additional training and concentration of the surgeon to give the necessary inputs to the system. This paper presents an IoT Surgery Assistive Robot called ‘Bot Nurse’ with a more humane approach to the surgeon-robot interaction by integrating speech recognition and computer vision techniques to overcome these limitations. The robot is a 4-DOF manipulator built on a mobile platform to serve surgical tools to the surgeon. The integrated tool table provides the working area for the robot. Commands are received by the microphone prior to identifying the surgeon's palm in the 3D space in real-time using the visual feed of the camera. The mathematical models for the inverse kinematics algorithm and computer vision algorithm were developed to perform the tasks. The prototype for the mechanical system was designed, developed and optimized according to the requirements. The experiments were conducted to evaluate the feasibility of the system focusing on the algorithms and the accuracy of tool serving. The results show that Bot Nurse can overcome the limitations of existing assistive robots.