NEEDLE INSERTION VREP SIMULATOR - README

This is a shared project between Robotics 2 and Medical Robotics. It consists in a VREP simulation of a needle penetration performed by a KUKA LWR 4+ teleoperated by a Geomagic Touch.

Requirements

• OpenHaptics and Geomagic Suite for Setup the connection PC -> Haptic Device
• VREP (only on Windows and Linux), link here
• CHAI3D library, downloadable from here.
• Visual Studio 2015 (tested on Express, but should work also with the Community version)

Build

In order to build the solution, you have to go through the following steps:

1. Unzip CHAI3D
2. Follow its guide to build the library
3. Clone the repository into <path_to_CHAI3D>\CHAI3D\modules\ folder
4. Open the file CHAI3D-V-REP-VS2015.vcxproj with VS2015
5. Change the output directory of the project (ALT + F7 and then Properties) with VREP root folder in which all the external plugin are located (something like C:\Program Files (x86)\V-REP3\V-REP_PRO_EDU)
6. Build the solution using CTRL + SHIFT + B in RELEASE and x86 mode. Obviously VREP must not be open, otherwise VS will fail the build.

Usage

Once you have successfully built the solution, you can open the scene robot_scene.ttt with VREP. There are two UIs:

• The first one allows you to enter the properties of the tissue, like K, B, thickness and the depth of each layer after which you will perforate it (expressed in percentace - so a number in [0.0f, 1.0f] )
• The remaining one allows you to set up the teleoperation scheme from the 3 available.

Notice that firstly you have to setup the layer parameter, then you setup the teleoperation and in order to start the simulation, you must press PLAY from the second UI, otherwise the scene won't work properly. There is a VREP bug that did not allow to restart the simulation after you stopped it, so if you want to re-run the simulation you have to close VREP, re-open the scene and start again the simulation (it's not our fault :) ).

If during the simulation you want to print to console something, it will be shown in the VREP console.

Remember that the Geomagic Touch is able to provide 3.3 N of maximum force, so the forces you send to the device should never exceed 3.0 N, otherwise you can broke the haptic device (CHAI3D should automatically saturate the forces, but we live in a probabilistic universe, so everything can happen :/)