Medical palpation is a diagnostic technique in which physicians use the sense of touch to manipulate the soft human tissue. This can be done to enable the diagnosis of possibly life-threatening conditions, such as cancer. Palpation is still poorly understood because of the complex interaction dynamics between the practitioners' hands and the soft human body. To understand this complex of soft body interactions, we explore robotic palpation for the purpose of diagnosing the presence of abnormal inclusions, or tumors. Using a Bayesian framework for training and classification, we show that the exploration of soft bodies requires complex, multi-axis, palpation trajectories. We also find that this probabilistic approach is capable of rapidly searching the large action space of the robot. This work progresses “robotic” palpation, and it provides frameworks for understanding and exploiting soft body interactions.

中文翻译：

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用于软体触诊的触觉感知动作增强

医学触诊是一种诊断技术，医生使用触觉来操纵人体软组织。这样做可以诊断出可能危及生命的疾病，例如癌症。由于从业者的手和柔软的人体之间复杂的相互作用动力学，触诊仍然知之甚少。为了了解这种软体相互作用的复杂性，我们探索了机器人触诊，以诊断异常内含物或肿瘤的存在。使用贝叶斯框架进行训练和分类，我们表明对软体的探索需要复杂的多轴触诊轨迹。我们还发现这种概率方法能够快速搜索机器人的大动作空间。这项工作推进了“机器人”触诊，