Within clinical environments, sterilization is an essential procedure for disinfecting surgical and medical instruments. For our engineering design project, our team was tasked with designing a remote system for securely transferring a surgical instrument to an autoclave for sterilization.

In my sub-team, I worked on designing a computer program using Python for controlling a robotic arm that would transfer a container to an autoclave location.

The robotic system works by interfacing with Quanser Labs using two muscle sensor emulators. Based on emulator data, the computer program performs various operations for controlling the robotic arm and autoclave bin drawers. This includes functions for controlling the gripper, end-effector and autoclave bins. A Raspberry Pi was used to interface with Q-Labs.

Attached below is an image depicting the Q-Labs Environment, featuring the Robotic Q-Arm.