Underactuated comanipulation for ultrasound breast exams

We investigate the possibility of providing adequate task assistance using under-actuated robots for human-robot tool co-manipulation. This novel approach optimizes robot-user synergy without taking into account any a priori knowledge of parameters depending on the user. Six different actuation modes were compared for a localization and scanning task. The best performance gain was achieved for 1 degree of under-actuation.