Thursday 5/14/2015

Experimented with physical needle tracking trajectories. Is working, almost had a disaster where the robot would try to insert meters rather than millimeters. This is a lesson to always be careful about the units. In the future, refactor to make that more robust.
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Discussed experimental details with Phil, Art, Bob. Going to start with one tube, but will fabricate two. Environmental registration will happen by tracking the position of three known points attached to bronchial tree model. Going to experiment initially with planar tube model.
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Things that need done for this first experiment:
Registration code needs to be completed.
The planner needs to be reconverted to use only one tube.
The insertion of the tube needs to be adapted to be a positive mm value, as queried from the robot object, because:
Manual insertion of the ctr and needle (and coupled) needs to happen. (becomes origin for ctr insertion at some point).
online-needle.cpp should capture automatically the start position from the tracker. (This also requires registration).
The trajectory following controller should read in the trajectory output from online-needle, or online-needle should send it directly, either way.
Orientation of concentric tube robot, alpha value needs calibrated.
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LUNCH WAS PROVIDED TO ME THIS DAY
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Started working on this three point to three point registration, using the orthogonal procrustes problem solution. It doesn't work yet though, that's a thing that needs to happen soon. About to skype with Ron.
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Ron would like me to perform one experiment, enough so that I am confident in being able to perform the subsequent experiments.
Then, gather skills.
Needle-making skills, nitinol tube shape-setting skills, phantom gel and environment skills.
Also, ask about an eta on the mechanical model.
Make sure before leaving that I know how to setup the robot with the second tube and use it with the second tube, but for now, one tube is a good idea.
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Registration code is working now, with manually entered values. Need to automate the capture of the three new points.
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online-needle.cpp now does automatically capture the start position from the tracker, but it hasn't been registered to the model's frame.
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online-needle.cpp now gathers the three points from the tracker frame, but is not yet computing the transformation (because I don't have 3 corresponding points in the model frame)