Project Description:
Uncoordinated eye rotation leads to binocular misalignment, such as strabismus, which affects over 18 million Americans. Strabismus is commonly treated surgically, but with suboptimal outcomes, with success rates reported from 30%- 80%. One cause of unsatisfied strabismus management is insufficient understanding of functions and synergetic control of the eye muscles. Engineering tools from imaging to modeling have been used to advance our understanding of eye neuro-biomechanics in normal and defective conditions. Physical systems that mimic human eyes have unique characteristics to obtain new knowledge on coordinated eye movement and its control. In this project, we propose to develop a new artificial muscle-driven eye robot that can realistically mimic binocular eye movement, study the biomechanics of human eyes, advance the knowledge needed to understand better and help better treat strabismus and other eye motion disorders. The proposed study addresses three main research questions to advance the fundamental knowledge gaps in modeling and control of oculomotor system: (1) how to model the highly nonlinear and complicated dynamic system in a simpler way; (2) how to create and control such a physical system with fast response and high precision; (3) how a human controls the oculomotor system, using what objectives. The proposed robotic eye platform offers unique advantages to explore coordinated control of eye and answer these research questions.
Sponsor: National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Super Coiled Polymer driven robot eye
Using eye robot to dispaly what patients see
Related Publications:
- Sunil Kumar Rajendran, Qi Wei, Ningshi Yao and Feitian Zhang, “Design, Implementation, and Observer-based Output Control of a Super-coiled Polymer-Driven Two Degree-of-Freedom Robotic Eye,” in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2023.
- Yidi Huang, Qi Wei, Joseph L Demer, and Ningshi Yao, “See What a Strabismus Patient Sees Using Eye Robots”, in Proc. 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 4627-4632, Detroit, Michigan, 2023.
- Sunil Kumar Rajendran, Qi Wei, Ningshi Yao and Feitian Zhang, “Observability Analysis and Reduced-Order Observer Design for a Super-Coiled Polymer-Driven Robotic Eye”, in Proc. 2022 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 1385-1391, Cancun, Mexico, 2022.
- Sunil Kumar Rajendran, Qi Wei, Ningshi Yao and Feitian Zhang, “Modeling and Learning-Based Control for Super-Coiled Polymer-Driven Robotic Eye,” in Proc. 2022 American Control Conference (ACC), 3361-3361, Atlanta, GA, USA, 2022.