The ROBOCAST project will bring advances to existing European companies (directly to the ones involved in the consortium and secondarily to companies that will benefit from project’s achievements) by providing them with the pool of skills, techniques and components to incorporate robotic and cognitive science technologies into their products.
The ROBOCAST project will improve competitiveness, boost knowledge-based employment, to make Europe independent upon foreign imports in a strategically vital technology. The ROBOCAST project will contribute to advancements in several aspects of science and technology. Achievement of the objectives set out in the ROBOCAST project will contribute substantially to the evolution in medical instrumentation. We therefore foresee leading-edge technology companies could create new products and services, and enhancing their existing ones. Haptic interfaces in surgery will experience a wide diffusion in the coming years, thus fuelling companies to develop new hardware and software products. Furthermore, the addition of force-feedback and of a haptic interface to direct the operation of robotic assistants will enable remote execution of surgical procedures.
All the activities proposed in this project specifically address the issues of effective medical diagnostics and therapeutics, as requested by the specific Call addressed by the ROBOCAST project, which will enable the development of effective diagnosis and preoperative planning for neurosurgery, the purpose of which is to make treatment quicker, less invasive, and more effective. In particular, the development of a biomimetic steerable miniature probe will enable a range of new surgical tasks (e.g. curved trajectories between an entry point and target lesion) and products, which are currently impossible with today’s technologies.
As the ROBOCAST systems belongs to the category of robots that work with people rather than away from people and it is based on robots that interact with people and with each other, intuitive and effective user-interface will be developed.
Development of medical devices requests a multidisciplinary approach by nature. In such a field, medical expertise have to be coupled with science and technology current advancements or direct them towards desired directions. The proposed team (ROBOCAST consortium) is multidisciplinary by nature and the proposed system represents a combination of human and machine skills, performing better than either one, when taken individually. The resulting robot will allow deepen the knowledge on natural cognitive systems since there will be efforts towards bio-mimetic control, locomotion and decision-making processes.
