Penetration detection with intention recognition for cooperatively controlled robotic needle insertion

In lumbar puncture surgeries, force and position information throughout the insertion procedure is vital for needle tip localization, because it reflects different tissue properties. Especially in pediatric cases, the changes are always insignificant for surgeons to sense the crucial feeling of loss of resistance. In this study, a robot system is developed to tackle the major clinical difficulties. Four different control algorithms with intention recognition ability are applied on a novel lumbar puncture robot system for better human–robot cooperation. Specific penetration detection based on force and position derivatives captures the feeling of loss of resistance, which is deemed crucial for needle tip location. Kinematic and actuation modeling provides a clear description of the hardware setup. The control algorithm experiment compares the human–robot cooperation performance of proposed algorithms. The experiment also dictates the clear role of designed penetration detection criteria in capturing the penetration, improving the success rate, and ensuring operational safety.

A GRU-Based Method for Predicting Intention of Aerial Targets

Since a target’s operational intention in air combat is realized by a series of tactical maneuvers, its state presents the characteristics of temporal and dynamic changes. Depending only on a single moment to take inference, the traditional combat intention recognition method is neither scientific nor effective enough. Based on a gated recurrent unit (GRU), a bidirectional propagation mechanism and attention mechanism are introduced in a proposed aerial target combat intention recognition method. The proposed method constructs an air combat intention characteristic set through a hierarchical approach, encodes into numeric time-series characteristics, and encapsulates domain expert knowledge and experience in labels. It uses a bidirectional gated recurrent units (BiGRU) network for deep learning of air combat characteristics and adaptively assigns characteristic weights using an attention mechanism to improve the accuracy of aerial target combat intention recognition. In order to further shorten the time for intention recognition and with a certain predictive effect, an air combat characteristic prediction module is introduced before intention recognition to establish the mapping relationship between predicted characteristics and combat intention types. Simulation experiments show that the proposed model can predict enemy aerial target combat intention one sampling point ahead of time based on 89.7% intent recognition accuracy, which has reference value and theoretical significance for assisting decision-making in real-time intention recognition.