I'm just starting my PhD with focus on bio-inspired robotics. I'm lucky to have quite a lot of freedom to choose the project I want to work on, as long as it fits the focus of the lab. Currently, the focus is on evolutionary robotics, AI, analysing the gap between simulation and reality and robotic surgery. Personally, I have quite a strong background in Computer Vision and loved working with ROS on my Masters project. The resources I have access to:
- Two advanced 3D printers
- Motoman SIA20 7 DoF robotic arm
- Universal Robots robotic arm
- Couple of high precision motion capture systems
- Nao
- Otto Bock SensorHand
- Kinects, Leap Motion and other various sensors
- People and doctors working at university hospital
- Some FPGA experts<p>... and of course hardware could be bought given a good project.<p>As you see, it's quite a good opportunity, so I'd like to hear your opinions on what you would do in my position without actually giving my thoughts first. Quite crazy thoughts are appreciated as well! :-)
This really depends on how practical you want to get. One of the biggest problems in hospitals is (lack of) staffing. Having a robot that could go around the rooms and check on low-level, treatment related problems would be a huge improvement in patient care. Imagine using CV to check on IV pumps for flow rate, how much of the drug is left, is it leaking, does the patient need more IV fluids, does the name on the drug label match the patient's, etc. These are low level problems that can lead to injury and death of patients in hospitals, and usually handled by overworked nurses. Seems like a perfect application of CV to me.