Medical ultrasound is a widely used diagnostic imaging modality that provides real-time imaging at a relatively low cost. However, its widespread application is hindered by the need for expert operation, particularly in remote regional areas where trained sonographers are scarce. This paper presents the development of HaptiScan, a state-of-the-art telerobotic ultrasound system equipped with haptic feedback. The system utilizes a commercially available robotic manipulator, the UR5 robot from Universal Robots, integrated with a force/torque sensor and the Phantom Omni haptic device. This configuration enables skilled sonographers to remotely conduct ultrasound procedures via an internet connection, addressing both the geographic and ergonomic limitations faced in traditional sonography. Key innovative features of the system include real-time force feedback, ensuring that sonographers can precisely control the ultrasound probe from a remote location. The system is further enhanced by safety measures such as over-force sensing, patient discomfort monitoring, and emergency stop mechanisms. Quantitative indicators of the system’s performance include successful teleoperation over long distances with time delays, as demonstrated in simulations. These simulations validate the system’s control methodologies, showing stable performance with force feedback under varying time delays and distances. Additionally, the UR5 manipulator’s precision, kinematic, and dynamic models are mathematically formulated to optimize teleoperation. The results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed system in overcoming the technical challenges of remote ultrasound procedures, offering a viable solution for real-world telemedicine applications.

Characterisation of virtual objects and their properties is made more efficient through a grasping interface device with force feedback. The requirement for such dexterity has produced complex haptic interface structures that impose limitations on device transparency and fidelity. This study examines the effectiveness of a cable-driven pinch-grasp haptic interface to accurately generate forces to a user's fingertips during object interaction in a virtual environment. Usability experiments were completed and comprised of size and stiffness discrimination tasks. Both studies compared grasping virtual objects under two modality configurations with the pinch-grasp interface. One configuration encompassed the combination of force and vision feedback, and the other maintained solely vision interaction with the device. Task completion times and correct identification were determined. Results demonstrate that the device improved task completion times in the two experiments when both force and vision feedback modalities were active. The percentage of correct identification was also greater in both experiments with force and vision feedback. These results motivate the use of a bidirectional cable actuation system for the development of multipoint dexterous haptic interface devices.

Firefighting is a physically demanding task that requires extensive training. With the rising risks of global warming and its evident effects on spawning bush fire, there is an increasing need for recruiting new fire fighters. This imposes an unprecedented challenge of fast-tracking training procedures, especially in rural environments where most bush fires occur. Additionally, the current manual training procedures do not take into consideration the immersion factor, without which a novice fire fighter may be overwhelmed when facing a bush fire for the first time. This challenge has motivated us to harness the power of virtual reality and develop a portable firefighting training system. The developed firefighting training system, presented in this paper, is haptically enabled to allow the trainees to experience the jet reaction forces from the hose. The system also features realistic water dispersion and interaction with fire and smoke particles via accurate particle physics modelling.

With the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and the relevant techniques, UAVs become common and popular for civilian applications such as remote sensing tasks. The reason is because they are cheap, flexible, and easy to set up. Car park occupancy analysis is important for authorities to make decisions on the design, plan and management of car parks. To have a quick knowledge of current parking situations, we proposed to use UAV images to count how many cars are parked during different periods. In this paper, our major contribution is a novel car counting approach for UAV images. Different from traditional detection- or segmentation-based counting techniques, the proposed counting method is density estimation based that does not need intense collection and learning procedures. We transform the car counting problem into the estimation of density values over pixels of an image. Experimental results have been conducted on real car park scenarios and all the results show that our method can provide a promising estimation of car numbers.

CHAI3D is a widely accepted haptic SDK in the society because it is open-source and provides support to devices from different vendors. In many cases, CHAI3D and its related demos are used for benchmarking various haptic collision and rendering algorithms. However, CHAI3D is designed for off-the-shelf single-point haptic devices only, and it does not provide native support to customised multi-point haptic devices. In this paper, we aim to extend the existing CHAI3D framework and provide a standardized routine to support customised, single/multi-point haptic devices. Our extension aims at two issues: Intra-device communication and Inter-device communication. Therefore, our extension includes an HIP wrapper layer to concurrently handle multiple HIPs of a single device, and a communication layer to concurrently handle multiple position, orientation and force calculations of multiple haptic devices. Our extension runs on top of a custom-built 8-channel device controller, although other off-the shelf controllers can also be integrated easily. Our extension complies with the CHAI3D design framework and advanced provide inter-device communication capabilities for multi-device operations. With straightforward conversion routines, existing CHAI3D demos can be adapted to multi-point demos, supporting real-time parallel collision detection and force rendering.

Existing haptic and non-haptic dental simulators do not eliminate the problem of hand instability while using the haptic devices for training purpose. This paper reports an audio-haptic dental training platform, which uses a Hand Stability System to reduce the effect of nervousness and hand instability for trainee dental students. Maintaining the ease of implementation, application customizability and the cost factor, the proposed platform increases the training efficiency by enhancing the immersive haptic experience with hand stability. This haptic platform includes multiple angle viewing techniques, audio feedback and session recording for after action review. Trials using this preliminary platform reduced the effect of human nervousness and hand instability due to the customized design.