How this researcher is using optical tools to control robotic systems
Mechanical engineering professor, Dr. Farrokh Janabi-Sharifi, is fascinated by robots. “The field of robotics opens another door to understand and mimic human functioning,” he explained. He is particularly interested in how we control our movements. “Similar to how we use our vision to adjust our actions or reactions, we could also use this rich sensor to control robots.”
For the past 30 years, Dr. Janabi-Sharifi has been faithful to the area of Opto-mechatronics, which looks to integrate optical tools into mechatronic devices. The core of his research focuses on vision-based control of robotic systems, which led him and his students to design the world’s first image-guided robotic cardiac intervention system. The story behind this goes back to a conversation between Dr. Janabi-Sharifi and his cardiologist friend, who complained that technology isn’t meeting the current needs of medicine. In particular, the cardiologist was looking for a non-invasive way to facilitate electrophysiology; a test performed through the catheters, used to measure the electric current of the heart to find problematic regions responsible for arrhythmia, unusual heart beating. The issues with the conventional practice was exposure of staff and patient to hazardous fluoroscopy radiation for visualizing localization of the catheter inside the heart, difficulty of guiding (control of) catheters leading to inaccurate positioning of catheter tips and long operation time. Wanting to take on this challenge, Dr. Janabi-Sharifi’s team designed a robot to perform this surgery with greater accuracy than humans themselves and enabled the cardiac interventionist to interact with the device and do the operation from another room, reducing radiation exposure time.
“In this operation, the interventiosts and their assistants are subjected to x-ray exposures because it is needed to see inside the heart, while the patients are injected with contrast material in order for the catheters to be visible,” Dr. Janabi-Sharifi described. “We thought that if a robot can do this, then we can at least remove these people from the possible harms caused by x-ray exposure and instead command a robot to do it with even more precision.”
“In the robot control area, you are exposed to a variety of applications,” he explains. We are also excited to celebrate Dr. Janabi-Sharifi as a recent grant recipient in another application that looks at designing unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to transport goods to remote locations. A significant issue that has continued to challenge Canada has been delivering necessary supplies to the northern area of our country, where many isolated reserves and communities exist. This problem was especially apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic with providing test kits and medicine to these regions. That’s why Dr. Janabi-Sharifi’s team started designing intelligent drones with arms to transport supplies independently and reliably with no cellular network to communicate. Since 2015, his team has worked on this unmanned aerial system project and collaborated with Canada’s northern communities, healthcare centers, and other universities.
Despite working in robotics for more than 30 years, he is still excited and enthusiastic about what he does. The professor describes how collaborating with his students is what continues to fuel his passion for his work. “It’s inspiring to work as an educator and train the younger generation. It keeps you feeling alive. It doesn’t make you think easily about retirement,” said Dr. Janabi-Sharifi.
“Similar to raising your own children, I see this as an opportunity to equip the students with multiple assets for their success in their future life. I have the opportunity to teach them not only to become great engineers but also to be more philosophical in the way that they look at life, innovate and impact society.”
