Medical Applications
In today’s world VR is expanding rapidly, even in the field of VR. With VR, doctors can easily explore the human body and perform complex operations using VR Prototyping. In the future, there is a possibility that doctors in augmented reality will be performing surgery using robots.
Now virtual reality is becoming to be a tool used even in medical surgery. Engineers propose to apply virtual reality technology to the design and implementation of Medical Robotic Interfaces. A system for human controlled, robotically performed surgery consists of two components: a master and a slave. The robotic slave device that performs the surgery on the patient, and a human interface master device that controls the robotic slave. The master/slave configuration basically provides an interface between the surgeon and the patients anatomy. The interface maps the surgeons movements and senses to the instruments.
The more accurate, efficient and intuitive the interface the better. A robotic system can potentially re-map the conventional surgical interface to increase accuracy, efficiency and intuitiveness. Virtual Reality technology applied to the master component can assist in the interface re-mapping by providing greater immersion as well as scaling of force and size.
Motivation
Human Controlled
Robot Manipulators can provide numerous advantages in performing surgical tasks,
especially in micro-surgery and minimally invasive surgical procedures. In
micro-surgery, robots can potentially provide high procession by performing
small manipulations that cannot be performed by hand. In minimally invasive
procedures, robots can provide additional degrees of freedom and a more intuitive
user interface than conventional laproscopic instruments that require inverted
hand movements outside of the patient.
Like in Minimally invasive laprosopic surgery and microsurgery, which are basically, interface problems. The surgeon is outside of the body trying to interact with tissue that is inside the body and at smaller scales. Virtual interface technology combined with robotic master/slave manipulators can potentially re-map this relationship between the surgeon and patient, and thereby provide additional degrees of freedom to the surgeons movements and senses, and close the gap between inside and outside, large and small.
In addition, virtual prototyping and simulation can be used to try out various interface and mechanical robot design approaches prior to construction and therefore reduce the time and cost of a complex engineering design cycle.
Description of Current Projects
Other project examples in the advancement of virtual reality are those of the VRiChEL lab. Which has started on simulations of modern chemical plants, which has been divided into three major projects Vicher1, Vicher2 and the first safety related simulation. These simulation will one day be able to provide perfect learning environments without any of the dangers. They will also provide a simple safe testing median for many projects and expirements.
Vicher 1
Vicher 1 is a
virtual simulation of a modern chemical plant, focusing on catalyst decay and
different methods of handling this problem on an industrial scale. Students
start out in the welcome center, and then move on to explore more significant
areas.
Rapid decay of catalyst is studied in the transport reactor room, where students can operate and explore a vertical straight through transport reactor and associated catalyst regenerator. Medium rates of catalyst decay are handled in a moving bed reactor, and slow decay is studied in the time-temperature room.
On a microscopic scale, students in Vicher 1 can observe diffusion surrounding a single catalyst pellet, and can then fly inside the pores of the catalyst to observe reactions occurring at the molecular level. Zooming in still further shows a single molecule reacting on the surface inside the catalyst pore.
Vicher 2Vicher 2 is another interactive virtual chemical plant simulation, focusing on non-isothermal effects in chemical kinetics and reactor design. Doors from the welcome center lead to three different engineering areas. In the non-isothermal packed bed reactor room, students observe changing temperatures down the length of a reactor as the inlet temperature is adjusted. A three-dimensional display of the kinetics involved helps students to understand the reactor's response to their adjustments.
The multiple steady states room illustrates a continuous stirred-tank reactor that can have different equilibrium operating conditions fro-identical control settings, depending on how these conditions were reached. The staged reactor area shows multiple reactors in series with interstage heating, used to overcome equilibrium limitations at lower temperatures.
Safety is another
virtual chemical plant, which differs from the Vicher simulations in two important
respects. On the one hand, it is a non-functional world, in that there are no
operational control panels, but on the other hand it contains a much higher
level of realistic detail, since it is based upon photographic data taken at
an actual chemical production facility. There is an extensive help facility
in both the Vicher applications and Safety. In the latter case, the help window
includes photographic detail that would not otherwise be possible in a virtual
reality simulation, as shown here.
Virtual reality offers the ability to explore spaces composed of pure information, with no walls or tangible objects as such. VRiChEL applications that explore the informational capabilities of virtual reality include thermodynamic relationships, and azeotropic distillation residue curves.
Another powerful feature of virtual reality is the ability to see how things fit together in three-dimensional space. VRiChEL applications for applying this to chemical engineering include crystal structures, and fluid flow velocity profiles.
Virtual reality
has great potential to improve undergraduate chemical engineering situations.
But first the strengths and weaknesses of virtual reality are in a technical
setting and must be further researched.